( Dr. John Lamont has kindly sent us the text of the lecture he gave on Thursday, March 16 in Greenwich, Connecticut)

The Significance of Pope Francis for the Church

By John Lamont

Jorge Maria Bergoglio was elected Pope in 2013, and is now 86. He is in poor health. Most of his pontificate is behind him, and we are in a position to draw some general conclusions about the nature and significance of the man and his tenure of the papal office.

One conclusion that can be drawn is that a dominating goal of Pope Francis’s pontificate has been the destruction of the work of his two predecessors. This work must be understood in the context of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). During this council and its aftermath, every aspect of Catholic faith and practice was attacked by powerful forces within the Church. These attacks were described by their initiators as being the implementation of that council, and they were largely successful, producing a transformation of the Catholic Church, a deep crisis, and a catastrophic decline that began in the 1960s and continues unabated to the present day. Neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI opposed these attacks on a broad front and as a whole. Instead, each of them concentrated on preserving and promoting a particular feature of Catholic teaching and tradition, hoping that their favoured element of tradition would provide the solution to the crisis in the Church.

John Paul II upheld and defended Catholic teaching on priestly celibacy, the impossibility of ordaining women to the priesthood, marriage, sexual morality, and the existence of moral absolutes. Benedict XVI’s initiative was to attempt to free the traditional Latin liturgy of the Church and make it accessible to all Catholics. Neither of these projects reversed the decline of the Church, but both of them had some success. Francis is ideologically committed to the total attack on Catholic faith and practice. He has accordingly made it his aim to defeat the counter-attacks of his two predecessors.

Pope Francis’s attack on the legacy of John Paul II was a major effort that involved calling a synod of the bishops of the Church. His strategy was to verbally affirm the indissolubility of marriage, but to insist that persons in a valid Catholic marriage who were civilly married to someone else could
receive the Eucharist. The Catholic Church has always refused the Eucharist to such persons, on the ground that they were publicly living in an adulterous relationship. John Paul II had firmly upheld this refusal. The strategy was largely successful. Pope Francis understood that his doctrinal opponents were weak and afraid of a direct confrontation with him. A small number of Catholic scholars and ecclesiastics denounced him for attacking the faith, but no cardinals and almost no bishops put up any
real opposition to his initiative. This initiative effectively denied the existence of marriage. It did not accept that one can cease to be married to one person and can then marry someone else, as is the case with Protestant and Jewish teaching and the civil law of marriage. Such a concept of dissoluble marriage at least stipulates that one has an exclusive relationship to a spouse when a marriage exists, and certain duties towards that person alone that follow from the relationship; and that this relationship must cease to exist, via divorce, before one can enter into another relationship of that sort with a different person. Pope Francis’s position, on the other hand, permits simply walking away from a
marriage that continues to exist, and taking up with someone else. This empties the notion of marriage of content.

Pope Francis’s attack on the legacy of Benedict XVI has focused on the traditional Latin liturgy. Some historical background is needed to understand this attack. In the twentieth century, two movements concerned with the liturgy arose within the Roman Catholic Church. The first of these saw the traditional liturgy as a neglected treasure that needed to be better known and practiced by Catholics, both lay and clerical. According to this movement, unfortunate historical and intellectual developments had led Catholics to turn away from the liturgy as a source of salvation and sanctification. The influence of the Jesuits, whose approach to the spiritual life centred on individual prayer rather than the liturgy, was considered to be one of these developments. This thesis was advanced by the Benedictines Dom Lambert Beaudoin and Dom Maurice Festugière in the first half of the 20th century, and opposed by the Jesuits Jean-Jacques Navatel and Louis Peeters. The Benedictines argued for the priority of the public liturgy of the Church in the spiritual life, whereas the Jesuits argued for the priority of personal prayer. The Italian priest Romano Guardini took the Benedictine side, and his book The Spirit of the Liturgy was a formative influence on the young Joseph Ratzinger. The liturgy here was understood to be the traditional Latin liturgy that took its substantive form under Pope Gregory the Great (ca. 540-604). It included not only the ceremonies for the Mass, but the rites of the other sacraments, the Divine Office (the public prayer of the Church said by monks and priests), and the various blessings and other prayers reserved to the clergy. Substantial initiatives of this first liturgical movement were the publication of missals containing both the liturgy of the Mass in Latin and a facing page translation in the vernacular, and an effort to restore sung masses with Gregorian chant as the normal form of worship.

The second movement was concerned not with reviving the Latin liturgy, but with replacing it. The Latin liturgy of the Church was seen as obsolete and inadequate not just in its use of the Latin language, but in its theology, ceremony, music and architecture. In a sense this movement accepted
the Jesuit idea of the primacy of personal prayer, and sought to implement it by changing the liturgy to suit the personal preferences of its adherents. This second movement had the goals of eliminating the use of Latin in Catholic worship, changing the dogmatic content of Catholic liturgy, and replacing traditional Catholic music, art, and architecture with modern forms. These goals were presented as necessary to make Catholic worship accessible and attractive to modern man, and as a means of attracting Protestants to the Church, but this presentation was largely a sales tactic. In fact the members of this movement hated the old Catholic liturgy and the dogmas it embodied, and sought their destruction as an end in itself.

The new Catholic liturgy introduced by Pope Paul VI in 1970 carried out the programme of this second movement. This liturgy was not a translation of the old Latin liturgy into vernacular languages, but a new production. Only 13% of the old prayers of the mass were preserved in a substantially
expanded liturgy. The composition of the new ritual was entrusted to mediocrities, whose lack of talent gave a free field of operation to their ideological zeal. References to divine punishment, hell, the devil, dependence on divine grace, salvation of the soul, reliance on the merits and intercessions of the saints, and the sacrificial character of the Mass were purged from prayers and Bible readings. Scriptural texts containing these unwelcome elements were bowdlerized or removed entirely (Psalms
57, 82, and 108, for example, have been excised). The traditional architecture and music of Catholic worship, one of the great cultural treasures of the human race, was rejected – in a process often involving vandalism and destruction – and replaced by modern design and pop music of the most banal and talentless kind.

The importance of this liturgical change has sometimes been acknowledged by sociologists, but is not generally realized. The destruction of Catholic worship was one of the most important and damaging events of the 20 th century. It abolished the religious culture of the Roman Catholic countries of Europe and Central and South America, and of the substantial Roman Catholic minorities in other countries. In Europe, the traditional Catholic culture was not replaced by a different religious culture that could be made to serve as the basis for a society, as happened when Islam replaced Christianity in the Middle East and North Africa. It was replaced by unbelief. In the first five years after the liturgical changes of Paul VI, a large percentage of priests, religious, and lay Catholics walked out of the Church. This decline has continued, slowing down at times but never ceasing. The Catholic Church in Western Europe is facing extinction. The formerly Catholic cultures of Europe, having lost their spiritual and cultural foundation, are threatened with the same fate. Even the secular and anti-clerical currents in European society have been mortally wounded by this change. Having lost their Catholic competition, they have no inducement to keep up their own intellectual and cultural standards, and have declined into imbecility.

Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, saw that this change was a disaster, and attacked it as an abuse of papal authority: “The pope is not an absolute monarch whose will is law; rather, he is the guardian of the authentic Tradition and, thereby, the premier guarantor of obedience. He cannot do as he likes, and he is thereby able to oppose those people who, for their part, want to do whatever comes into their head. His rule is not that of arbitrary power, but that of obedience in faith. That is why, with respect to the Liturgy, he has the task of a gardener, not that of a technician who builds new machines and throws the old ones on the junk-pile. … What happened after the Council was something else entirely: in the place of liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it, as in a manufacturing process, with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.” 1)

After his election to the papacy, Benedict XVI acted on this conviction. He issued a decree, Summorum Pontificum, acknowledging the right of priests to celebrate the traditional Latin liturgy, and obliging bishops to provide this liturgy to lay groups who requested it. The decree produced or expanded traditionalist communities all over the world, whose congregations were characterized by large families, low average age, and doctrinal orthodoxy. Traditionalist communities also produced vocations to the priesthood and religious life out of all proportion to their numbers.

This was an extraordinary result. Anyone looking at the preservation of the Latin language inthe Catholic Church prior to 1965, when it quickly began to be abandoned, would have seen the civilizational connections of that language as an essential part of the case for using it. Latin was the language of civilization for Western Europe from the establishment of the Roman Empire up until the 13th century. The use of Latin in the Roman Catholic Church meant that the Catholic Church preserved that heritage of civilization. Keeping Latin meant not just keeping alive the Catholic theology and worship that was bound up with that heritage, but keeping alive the heritage itself, and extending it beyond Europe to people who would benefit from it.

This was a good argument prior to 1965, but by the time Benedict XVI restored the Latin mass, it had become obsolete. Cultural links to the Latin civilization of Europe had been largely obliterated. The traditional communities that sprung into being after his restoration were almost entirely composed of Catholics to whom the heritage of Latin literature, culture and history were unknown. In Europe and North America, the culture, if it can be called that, in which these communities were born was a complete negation of the cultural basis of the Latin mass. The success of these communities has few parallels in religious history. Africans and Native Americans had adopted the Latin liturgy with enthusiasm when exposed to it by missionaries in the 16th to 19th centuries, but this adoption could be seen as benefiting from the prestige and power of the European states from which the missionaries had come. There is now no prestige attached to the Latin mass, which is still often celebrated in school gyms and the chapels attached to funeral homes. Its growth can only be reasonably explained by a purely religious power inherent in the traditional liturgy.

Pope Francis moved against the Latin mass in July 2021, after addressing the legacy of John Paul II. This was no doubt partly due to a prudent policy of dealing with one enemy at a time. He issued a decree, Traditionis Custodes, which imposed severe restrictions on the celebration of the Latin mass, that were designed to lead to its eventual extinction. Prior to issuing the decree, he sent a questionnaire to all the Roman Catholics bishops of the world inquiring about the use of the Latin Mass in their dioceses. Reliable leaks of the responses to the questionnaire indicate that the majority of the bishops reported favourably on the Latin mass and the communities attached to it, which would explain why these responses were not made public by the Vatican. In his public letter accompanying the decree, Francis announced that ‘the responses reveal a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene’; this need not be taken to be a lie, since he would consider a favourable attitude of the bishops towards the Latin mass to be extremely undesirable. In a typical maneouvre, he has used one of his creatures, Cardinal Arthur Roche, to enforce the programme of the destruction of the traditional liturgy set forth in Traditionis Custodes. Roche, a mediocrity who is nothing without Francis, is to attract the blame and opprobrium for doing his master’s will.

There is a sense in which Francis has failed in destroying the legacies of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a sense in which he has succeeded. He has failed in suppressing belief in the religious and moral truths that John Paul II insisted on, and in suppressing the traditional Latin mass that Benedict XVI restored. He has succeeded in destroying the projects of harmonisation that accompanied both those legacies. John Paul II’s project was the harmonisation of the Second Vatican Council with the Catholic truths he chose to uphold, and Benedict XVI’s project was some sort of fusion of the traditional Latin mass and the Novus Ordo – with the former being dominant – rather than a simple scrapping of the ritual of Paul VI and a return to the old mass. Benedict XVI included both these projects of harmonisation under the term of ‘hermeneutic of reform’, which he opposed to the ‘hermeneutic of rupture’. The latter hermeuneutic was the understanding of the Second Vatican Council as a rejection of Catholicism, and the attack on the faith that implemented this understanding. The projects were the personal initiatives of these popes, who did not manage to impose them in a way that would survive after their pontificates. Pope Francis rejects both of them, and thanks to him they are now dead.

Pope Francis has not restricted himself to a reactive policy of destroying the work of his predecessors. He has taken positive steps to advance the programme of eradicating the faith. One of these steps is the adoption of a theme from that pontificate of John Paul II. John Paul II made a number of gestures and statements that could be seen as favouring the idea that all religions are paths to salvation. The best known is his interfaith meeting at Assisi in 1986, where Catholics, Buddhists, Hindus and an assortment of other religious believers all prayed, sacrificed or performed other rituals together. His kissing the Koran and praying together with Togolese animists are other examples. (Animism is the African ancestor of Haitian Voodoo, and furnished Voodoo with some of its gods; it is largely concerned with detecting and eliminating witches and placating malign spirits.) Implicit in these actions of John Paul II was the idea that all religions are ways to God, with Christianity being simply the best developed of these ways. Pope Francis has explicitly endorsed this idea and participated in a number of activities that embody it. These activities include presence at an idol-worshipping ceremony in the Vatican gardens and the signing in Abu Dhabi of a syncretistic document, the Declaration of Human Fraternity, together with the imam of Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

Pope Francis’s other positive initiative is a personal one. It is an attack on the legal and institutional structure of the Church. By ‘institutional structure’ is meant the actual personnel that compose the Church leadership, and the agreed practices and traditions outside of canon law itself that determine the way the Church is governed. These include administrative practices and the criteria and practice concerning the selection of men to fill ecclesiastical offices.

Francis does not follow canon law, and he prefers not to use it as an instrument to enforce his will. His policy on marriage and the Eucharist contradicts canon law, but he does not deal with this contradiction by changing the law; he leaves it on the books and ignores its existence. He has
consistently shielded sexual abusers from ecclesiastical and civil authorities. Of course the usual practice in the Church is for bishops and religious superiors to protect sexual criminals and conceal their crimes. But the goal of this policy is to prevent these criminals being caught. Once they are caught, the policy is to say that no-one knew anything about them. Francis’s approach is different. He protects and even promotes such men after they have been caught as well as before. This can be seen in the cases of Fr. Julio Grassi, Fr. Mauro Inzoli, Fr. Marko Rupnik, and Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta. He seems to consider that having been caught for such acts gives a priest a title to respect.

When confronted with a task or a subject matter to be examined and pronounced upon, Francis generally does not make use of the responsible curial office. He uses other advisors, and often makes his bypassing of the responsible office obvious, in order to demonstrate its impotence and establish that his untrammelled will decides everything. He does not show loyalty to his subordinates, official or unofficial, and eventually turns on them after having made use of them. As far as possible he only appoints bishops and cardinals who agree with his agenda, and he has no standards of education or experience that his appointees must meet.

Francis’s policy, especially when it comes to appointments that carry real power with them, is to choose individuals who are compromised in some way; either by committing crimes, or by covering them up, or both. His approach to American appointments is worthy of note. Francis is a Latin American leftist and as such detests the United States. He detests the American Catholic Church in particular for its support of John Paul II’s role in the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. He appears to have made a special effort to appoint leaders of the American church who will cause the most possible discredit.

Francis’s approach to governance is a tried and tested one. It has been well described by one of its more talented practitioners:

If you really want to do something new, the good won’t help you with it. They are self-satisfied, lazy, they have their God and their own pig-headedness – you can’t do it with them. ‘Let me have men about me that are fat.’ An anointed king can say that, but not a leader that has made himself. Let me have men about me that are arrant knaves. The wicked, who have something on their consciences, are obliging, quick to hear threats, because they know how it’s done, and for booty. You can offer them things, because they will take them. Because they have no hesitations. You can hang them if they get out of step. Let me have men about me that are utter villains – provided that I have the power, absolute power over life and death. The sole and absolute leader, whom no-one can interfere with. What do you know of the possibilities in evil! Why do you write books and make philosophy when you only know about virtue and how to acquire it, whereas the world is fundamentally moved by something quite different? 2)

This policy was known in influential circles before his election to the papacy, and helped his rise to that office. Cardinal McCarrick before his disgrace boasted of how he helped to secure Bergoglio’s election. McCarrick had addressed the General Congregation before the conclave that elected Francis, and urged upon the assembled cardinals the desirability of choosing a Latin American pope. No influential cardinal supports a papal candidate without first informing himself about that candidate and about what the candidate has to offer him. McCarrick knew that Francis was his man and that he was Francis’s, because he knew that Francis’s method of government relied on men like himself.

What is the significance of Pope Francis? I think the answer to this question is suggested by Johann Chapoutot, the brilliant French scholar of Nazism. In 2018 Chapoutot and Christian Ingrao published a biography of Adolf Hitler that sought to understand Hitler’s significance. In a talk presenting the biography, Chapoutot gave this account of their thesis:

One of the most common explanations for Nazism, without explaining it in relation to one’s self, and in the end evacuating it of significance, is to say that Hitler was a madman and that all those Nazis were caught up in a sort of St. Vitus’s dance, morbid and macabre, that carried away Europe and their era in a whirlwind of suffering and horror. This is an explanation that does not explain. It is far too convenient; one can see how it provides psychological reassurance, but it is not accurate. Hitler poses a problem for us not because he is a madman, but because he is a monster. He is a monster. What is a monster? A monster is an individual that we find difficult to explain today – today, and for let us say perhaps two hundred years. A monster is a thing, a phenomenon, that several centuries ago had a meaning and made sense. Consider the etymology of ‘monster’; it comes from ‘monstrare’ in Latin, which means to indicate, to show, to give a sign of something, to be a sign of something. And in fact, in a world saturated with the divine, saturated with transcendence, saturated with magic perhaps, the monster, the one who is an extreme departure from normality, who is extreme by his evil acts for example, is the sign ofsomething; a sign of the anger of God, of the divine vengeance that is striking us. 3)

Chapoutot and Ingrao’s discussion of Hitler has merits and defects that do not concern us here. What does concern us is their explication of of the concept of a monster. This concept provides the interpretive key for an understanding of Francis and his papacy. Francis is a monster. He has been
described and explained as a Peronist, a modernist heretic, a Jesuit who exhibits the worst failings that characterize members of that order. These descriptions are not wrong, but they do not get to the important truth about him. The extremity of his evil acts identifies him as outside the normal order of things, as a phenomenon that does not belong to the natural or supernatural structure of human life.

What is he a sign of? Francis, in his personality, actions, and beliefs, is a sign of the true nature of the transformation of the Church that occurred during and after the Second Vatican Council. The arrogance, hatred, criminality and love of destruction that he manifests so clearly were the motive
forces for this transformation and its leaders. He is a sign of the failure and the fundamental dishonesty of the projects of ‘harmonization’ undertaken by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He is also a sign of the corruption of the Catholic priesthood and episcopate. With very few exceptions,
Catholic priests and bishops have either supported his destructive acts or kept quiet about them. There have been other manifestations of this corruption. The offence of criminal sexual abuse is widespread among Catholic priests and religious. The persons who are best informed about these offences are other Catholic priests and bishops. The offenders are however absolutely never denounced by their fellow clerics. These offences are kept secret as far as possible by the criminals, but Pope Francis’s crimes are public knowledge. The silence of priests and bishops in the face of his
crimes reveals their baseness and treachery in an unmistakable way.

When the topic of the sins of priests is raised, one often encounters this quotation from St. Anthony Mary Claret:
…. when His just indignation reaches its climax, He sends the last and most atrocious of His punishments by allowing unfaithful ministers, stained priests, scandalous shepherds to appear among men. Then it happens that the abominations of the people are the cause of the bad priests, and the bad priests are the greatest punishment with which God chastises the people.

This quotation is often used to support the fallacious inference that since God sends bad priests to punish a bad people, if priests are bad it is because the people have sinned. The responsibility for a corrupt priesthood is thus handily shifted from the priests to the laity. There is no evidence that this
shifting is justified when it comes to Francis and the progressive, ‘conciliar’ cause that he champions. In 1960, the Catholic laity around the world were not notably corrupt, certainly not in comparison to many other historical epochs. Fr. Bryan Houghton asserts that the opposite was the case:

This issue was that the new reforms in general and of the liturgy in particular were based on the assumption that the Catholic laity were a set of ignorant fools. They practised out of tribal custom; their veneration of the Cross and the Mass was totem-worship; they were motivated by nothing more than the fear of hell; their piety was superstition and their loyalty, habit. But the most gratuitous insult of all was that most Catholics had a Sunday religion which in no way affected their weekly behaviour. This monstrous falsehood was—and still is—maintained by bishops and priests who, for the most part, have never been adult laymen. Every day the Catholic workman had to put up with the jeers of his colleagues, as the more educated with their sneers. Every night they took their religion to bed with them. … I am not in a position to judge other priests’ parishioners. I am, however, in a position to judge what were my own. No words are adequate for me to express my admiration for the conscious faith and piety of my flock, both in Slough and in Bury. This is where the trouble lay. The reforms were based on criticism; I was unwilling to take any action which might make me appear to criticise the wonderful people whom I was ordained to serve. I was perfectly conscious that I learned more about God from them than they were likely to learn from me. 4)

The significance of Pope Francis is that Catholic priests and bishops as a body have betrayed Our Lord and the Catholic faithful, and that they must repent, make atonement for their sins, and work to undo the harm they have done.

1. Ratzinger, Joseph, Preface to The Organic Development of the Liturgy by Alcuin Reid, OSB (Ignatius Press, 2005), 2nd ed.
2. Hermann Goering, quoted in Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich; Portraits in Nazi Leadership, tr. Michael Bullock (Ace Books: New York, N.Y., 1970), p. 124-125.
3. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEQvVDGVWNE , voir jusqu’au 12:55] The original text of Johann Chapoutot’s remarks is as follows: Hitler est un paravent commode pour nous tous. C’est celui que nous identifions au nazisme, au mal absolu, et qui au fond fait écran et nous empêche de penser un phenomene, le nazisme, dont nous participons nous aussi, puisque ce phénomène est né culturellement et pratiquementet s’est deployé en Allemagne, c’est a dire en Europe, c’est-a-dire en occident. Et jusqu’à preuvedu contraire nous sommes aussi des européens et des occidentaux. Mais avoir affiché – voyez le couverture [c-à-d du livre, montré sur un ecran derrière les auteurs] – le paravent Hitler, cet écran-la – nous détourne de ce questionnement-là, puisque nous attribuons beaucoup de choses à ce personnage et a son entourage avec une réduction personnelle, personnalisante, psychologique, psychologisante, qui nous empêche encore une fois de penser le phenomene. Et une des explication les plus courantes pour expliquer le nazisme, sans en expliquer vis-à-vis de soi-meme, et au fond de l’évacuer, c’est de dire que Hitler était fou et que tous ces gens-la étaient saisis d’une forme de danse de saint-guy sadique, morbide, macabre, qui a emporté l’Europe et cette époque dans un tourbillon de malheur et d’horreur. C’est une explication qui n’en est pas une, elle est beaucoup trop commode, on en voit le, comment le dire, le confort psychologique, celui qu’on en retire, mais elle n’est pas exacte. Hitler de fait nous pose problème, non pas parce qu’il serait fou, mais parce qu’il est un monstre. Il est un monstre. Qu’est que c’est qu’un monstre? Un monstre c’est un individu dont on a du mal a rendre raison ou a se rendre raison aujourd’hui – aujourd’hui, disons, depuis peut-être deux cents ans. Un monstre, c’est quelquechose, c’est un phénomène qui il y a quelques siècles était porteur de sens. Voyez l’etymologie du terme monstre; ca vient de monstrare en latin, qui veut dire faire signe vers, envoyer une signe, etre une signe de quelquechose. Et de fait, dans un monde saturé du divin, saturé de transcendance, saturé de magie peut-etre, le monstre, celui qui est exorbitant à la normalité, celui qui est exorbitant par ses actes maléfiques par exemple, est le signe de quelquechose; de la colère de Dieu, de la vengeance de la divinité qui s’abat sur nous. Le monstre a un sens; il a un signification. Dans un monde désenchanté, désenchanté au sens positif du terme, dont l’enchantement, dont la magie a disparu, eh bien l’aubépine qui fleurit dans l’hiver n’a plus de sens, de la même manière que le monstre n’a plus de sens; d’où notre fascination médusé devant les grands criminels, devant les tuers en série, qui font l’object de series et d’émissions a repetition, de romans. Nous nous interrogeons sur ces personnages. Eh bien, nous avons voulu prendre le monstre au sens etymologique au pied de la lettre, Christian Ingrao et moi, et nous avons voulu le lire comme un signe. Ce personnage-là est un monstre que nous avons voulu relire comme un signe; sans l’apparat de transcendence, sans l’appareil de transcendance, mais tout simplement en historien.
4. (Houghton, Fr. Bryan, Unwanted Priest, p. 81).

Ritorno alle Sorgenti: Il mio Pellegrinaggio a Oriente nel Cuore dell’Ortodossia (A Return to the Sources: My Pilgrimage to the East in the Heart of Orthodoxy)

By Alessandro Gnocchi 

Edizioni Monasterium, Cellio, 2023

The current state of the Church is presenting faithful Catholics with terrible and tragic choices. What can they do to preserve their liturgy, their morality and their Faith and pass them on to their children? One possibility that is increasingly relevant is the Eastern Orthodox Church.  To what extent is Orthodoxy a viable alternative to the Roman Catholic Church?

Alessandro Gnocchi is an Italian writer and journalist. For years he worked together with Mario Palmaro tirelesssly defending Catholic tradition in all its aspects. With Palmaro, Gnocchi was one of the earliest and most perceptive critics of Pope Francis. Together, they predicted all too clearly what was about to befall the Catholic Church. Mario Palmaro died in 2014. Since then, I’ve heard little of his colleague in arms. But I now understand that in 2019 Alessandro Gnocchi joined the Russian Orthodox Church (he is now “Aleksandr,” at least when receiving communion). This year, he has published a short book telling of his experiences of Eastern Christianity.

Now in judging this book, we should not be swayed by contemporary political pressures. And the last thing I would want is to rekindle obsolete polemics between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. So, we should not be quick to denounce the author but try to understand what motivated his decision. After all, other Catholic apologists over the years have taken this step,  most notably Rod Dreher. 

I have some personal insight into the matter since, through much of the 1980s. I was a parishioner at Saint Michael’s Russian Catholic Chapel in New York. Subsequently,  I got to know members of the Russian Orthodox community in the United States – especially one good friend who died in 2020. 

What does Gnocchi find attractive in Orthodoxy?

We should start with the liturgy. For the Orthodox churches have preserved the ancient liturgies of the Church.  They have (generally) resisted the temptation to compromise with the spirit of this age. For example, (though Gnocchi himself seems ambivalent about this point)  we should remember that both the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches have insisted on retaining liturgical languages that are not easy to understand for speakers of modern Greek or Russian. 

Orthodoxy has retained the central role of monasticism and therefore of asceticism and mysticism. These are not just as the preserve of esoteric specialists but are incorporated into the life of the entire church. So, for the Orthodox the center of gravity of their religion is not the patriarchate of Constantinople or of Moscow but the monasteries of Mount Athos. And as Gnocchi points out, those monks who have received  the grace for the task undertake the role of counselors or spiritual directors for the laity that have recourse to them. Thus, monasticism is integrated into the world of the Orthodox faithful.

Continuing in this line of thought, the Orthodox Church still treasures the theological and spiritual classics of patristic and medieval times. It celebrates the role of the great saints of the past.  In contrast to the West, which generally restricts the sources of its theology to Vatican II and subsequent papal pronouncements, the Orthodox world draws on the Eastern fathers of the church, the Desert Fathers, the mystics of late antiquity and the Middle Ages as well as more modern contributions. These sources are all still living presences in the Orthodox faith.

Gnocchi also speaks of icons and the traditional art of the Eastern Church. In Eastern theology their role is far beyond that of a mere depiction or reminder of a sacred person or event. The icon creates a real presence of that person, of the sacred in the world of today. Therefore, the artist of icons, such as the famous Andrei Rublev, is ideally a holy man, a monk,

Gnocchi has some extravagant praise for the Orthodox monks and elders he has encountered on his “pilgrimage.” But even discounting these exaggerations, what he is really pointing out is that, for all his faults, the Eastern priest, the Eastern monk is still a man of God – he acts as a spiritual leader through the liturgy,  through the other sacraments, through his spiritual counsel. The contrast with the Roman Catholic clergy, secularized,  bureaucratic, self-regarding and self-promoting, could not be greater. And of course, there is no Pope in Orthodoxy.  Gnocchi does not need to write much about patriarchs and bishops. These are not the center of the Orthodox faith.

So far it would seem that Orthodoxy is a most attractive alternative to what passes for Christianity in the Western Church. Yet, this is not the end of the story.   As we shall see, I don’t think that Gnocchi makes a very compelling case for the Orthodox Church.

I will start with his style. In extravagant and exalted language, he sings the praises of Orthodoxy and attempts to convey abstruse points of theology. In other passages, particularly in the second half of the book, he turns strident and confrontational on topics like filioque and papal infallibility. Throughout there’s a constant use of Russian terminology. Gnocchi appears to be less a humble sinner or a seeker after truth but that most tiresome of individuals: the religious fanatic.

Now I have heard of this happening to Catholics who become Orthodox. As in Gnocchi’s book, they want to transform themselves into a Russian or Greek and break utterly with the West and their own past. Is this really a consequence of their own Roman Catholic heritage: the obsession with doctrinal terms, the agitated tone, a certain fixation on the clergy?  I don’t think it’s just the fault of the converts, however. For the Eastern churches themselves, as I understand it,  demand of the new convert complete repudiation of his past and of all his ancestors.  I have heard that sometimes a convert has sent such a declaration to the members of his former community or parish – was not this very book written at the instigation of Gnocchi’s elder or “staretz”? (More of this later.)

Here we come to a critical point: the “Eastern” ideology that is forcefully advocated by Gnocchi. This holds that there exists a fundamental difference between Western and Eastern Christianity dating back at least to the 4th century and that the two Churches had evolved into different mutually exclusive worlds many years before the supposedly decisive break of 1054. Indeed, for Gnocchi the decisions of the hierarchies on mutual recognition  – or not – play little or no role given this fundamental chasm between West and East. This self-understanding of Eastern Christianity as an unchanging, pure, isolated block descended from Apostolic times is the Orthodox equivalent of Western ultramontanism which tried to find the 19th century papacy in the 4th century and earlier.

This is, of course, historically preposterous. From the 4^th century onward the popes of Rome, Western doctors and saints had influenced and interacted with the East just as the doctors, saints and councils of the  Eastern Churches did the West. Indeed, Pope Gregory the Great is (probably erroneously ) considered as the author of the Orthodox service of the presanctified gifts.  Greek and Eastern popes governed the Church for much of the 7th and 8th centuries. Between 730 and 840 (with one interruption) it was the Eastern Church, not the West, that was dominated by iconoclastic heretics.   Neilos, a Greek monk (born in Italy!), recognized as a saint in both East and West. established around 1000 a monastery,  Grottaferrata, not too far removed from Rome itself. And, even afterwards, contacts between the two churches were not at all entirely broken off  – consider the career of El Greco in the 16th century in Spain, of all places.

Another alienating feature of Gnocchi’s spirituality is his relationship with his elder or staretz. This role of the staretz is personally unfamiliar to me. I had always understood it to involve the voluntary recourse by a layman, let’s say,  to the staretz – a monk who makes available to him the spiritual insights gained in the contemplative life. But Gnocchi’s staretz seems to have assumed the controlling role that used to be ascribed to the Jesuits. By the way,  it is totally untrue, as is asserted here, that this type of counseling is unknown in in the West.  We might mention the anchoresses of medieval England, just as one example.

I hope the reader does not think that the tone of this book, now confrontational, now enthusiastic, at times ranting or overblown, is typical of the faithful of the Orthodox Church. Far from it.   The born-and-bred Orthodox have a very relaxed attitude to their faith, as it is as natural to them as their own nationality. After all, the Orthodox Church still places the greatest weight on the role of the nation: Serbian, Greek, or Russian. The nation is the contemporary descendant of the governing function once performed by the Byzantine or Russian emperors.  In certain branches of Orthodoxy like the OCA (the Orthodox Church of America) or the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese in America, the relationship with contemporary society becomes perhaps too cozy, resulting in problems like those afflicting the Roman Catholic Church.

And, in contrast to what Gnocchi presents, the attitude of the Orthodox, both laity and clergy, to the Western world is not at all unrelentingly hostile. Consider this passage from Gnocchi’s own book:

 In the Orthodox Church the divine liturgy is the most perfect expression of the true faith. When Pope Benedict XVI “liberalized” the celebration of the ancient mass, Patriarch Alexei II commented, “it is a step in the right direction. For if we had touched the divine liturgy, we would never have been able to survive 70 years of state atheism.”

Given its spiritual treasures, I think the case for Orthodoxy can be made. Gnocchi in this book has regrettably not succeeded in doing that. I would think this divisive work would have exactly the opposite effect. That’s a shame. Because amid this darkening world,  it is essential that all adherents of Christian Tradition rally in the defense of Christianity and the Truth.    

The Fury of the Death Throes of the “Spirit” of Vatican II

by Father Richard Cipolla

It was always about the Liturgy. Bugnini and those who preceded him in the
twentieth century redefinition of the Liturgical Movement, away from a
rediscovery of the Traditional Liturgy to a drive to change and adapt the Liturgy to
the “needs of modern man”, always knew and understood this. The Documents of
the Second Vatican Council will meet the same fate as the great majority of the
Canons of past Ecumenical Councils—save the first seven— mostly forgotten,
except for what was part of the genuine unfolding of Catholic Tradition. No one
remembers the Canon from Lateran IV calling for provincial councils for the
purpose of reforming morals, nor the Canon that condemned the teaching of
Joachim of Fiore. What is remembered and therefore became a part of the
Tradition is the definition of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist in terms
of “transubstantiation”. Even more recently, who remembers or refers to the
teaching of Vatican I on faith and reason, or its condemnation of rationalism? The
definition of Papal Infallibility is what is remembered in the living Tradition. In no
way does this reduce the central importance of the Ecumenical Councils in the
Tradition of Catholic Church. It merely reminds us that what is fundamentally
important in the decrees of these Councils in the development of dogma becomes
apparent in the voice of the Holy Spirit who is not encumbered by the limitations
of time, space and human frailty.
When one looks at and reads the Documents of Vatican II –there are no
Canons—one is constantly struck by the language that tries to include the voice of
the Tradition and openness to “the modern world”, or at least the world of the
1960s.
This is clearly seen in Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Document on the Liturgy.
There we read that the Latin language is to be preserved, but in those parts of the
Mass that include instruction of the faithful the vernacular may be used. Pride of
place is to be given to Gregorian chant as the music of the Mass. But other forms
of music, including contemporary compositions, may be used if it helps with
“active participation.” The fact is that both Latin and Gregorian chant disappeared
within a few years after the imposition of the Mass of St. Paul VI. Le trahison des
clercs used the cultural forces unleashed in the !960’s and the decades following to
not only reduce the Liturgy to a permanent replay of the Brady Bunch complete
with polyester and bad taste, but also invented what became known as the “Spirit”
of Vatican II, the actual documents of which Council were of little interest to those
imbued with this “Spirit”.

It is not as if that “Spirit” were not opposed by both clergy and lay men and
women. But for the most part, the laity that were so eloquently championed in a
real way by St. John Henry Newman a century before were all too happy, guided
by this “Spirit” to become chierichetti, little clergy, happy to have the honor of
being lectors, eucharistic ministers, and running CCD classes, instead of attending
to their vitally important role in their families and in the world in which they live
and worked.
The greatest accomplishment of those imbued with the “Spirit” of Vatican II was
the work of the Concilium set up by St Paul VI to do the work of the reform of the
Liturgy based on the admittedly sketchy hopes of Sacrosanctum Concilium. What
they produced was the product of a deep antipathy to the Traditional Roman Mass,
(rather an antipathy to the Tradition itself) and of a longing to embrace the world
around them that they identified as the future of mankind. One cannot and must
not deny the reality of the grace that Catholics have received while participating in
the Novus Ordo Mass these past six decades. The validity of that form of the Mass
is not in question. What is in question is the continuity of the Novus Ordo Mass
with the Roman Mass of Catholic Tradition. This author is one of many, who are
much more learned than I, who have shown clearly that there is a discontinuity of
content and form between the Novus Ordo rite and the Traditional Roman Mass.
The fact that 70% of Catholics no longer believe in the Real Presence of Christ in
the Eucharist and that in many if not most places in the Western world fewer than
20% of Catholics go to Mass is strong evidence that something went wrong after
the imposition of the Mass of St. Paul VI and still is wrong.
One of the most important hopes of the Concilium inventors of the Novus Ordo
Mass and those who invented the “Spirit” of Vatican II is that by this time no
Catholic would have heard of (except in history books) or experienced the power
and beauty of the Traditional Roman Mass in an actual celebration of that rite.
And they almost succeeded. Thanks to St. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict
XVI, and to the working of the Holy Spirit in his own time and manner, thousands
of Catholics, especially young Catholics both priests and lay, have discovered the
power and beauty of the Traditional Roman Mass.
The Motu Proprio, Traditionis Custodes, the following “Response to the Dubia”
and now the latest salvo just published by Cardinal Roche completely taking away
the bishops’ fundamental right as Pastors of their flock to regulate worship in their
diocese is the fury of a death throe. Boldly eliminating the power of Canon Law as
a potent spray-can deterent to get rid of roaches and other insects that infest the

holy house of the Church: this is an intensification of the Fury of the Death
Throes of the SPIRIT of Vatican II. And we have cause to await a further death
throe in Holy Week (irony) with yet another document that will not only proclaim
the death of the Traditional Roman Mass but also issue restrictions on how some
young priests celebrate the Novus Ordo in a way that this “Spirit” fears as redolent
of the Tradition.
But we must not fear this “Spirit”. For it will die with my generation, which is the
generation of the present Pope. The malodor of the “Spirit” will linger in puffs
throughout the world, from Rome to San Diego to parts of Europe. But the air will
clear.

And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Crepusculo: Lettere dalla Crisi della Chiesa (Twilight: Letters from the Crisis of the Church)

By Aurelio Porfiri and Aldo Maria Valli

Chorabooks, Hong Kong, 2022

Aurelio Porfiri and Aldo Maria Valli have now given us three short books that together represent a profound series of reflections on the state of the Church today. I have already reviewed the first in the sequence, Uprooted: Dialogues on the Liquid Church(Sradicati, 2019)) – which also has been translated into English. I am looking forward to receiving the second, Decadence (Decadenza, 2020). Finally, in 2022 appeared Twilight (Crepuscolo). The title captures the state of the Catholic Church of today. The authors ask if this twilight is the growing darkness before nightfall or that before a new dawn? For the American reader, however, the title of course has  added significance in relation to the Roman Catholic Church of today: the Twilight Zone!

Like its sisters, Twilight takes the time-honored literary form of an exchange of letters. The personalities of the two authors are complementary. Aldo Maria Valli, a journalist, Vaticanist, media and TV commentator, is poetic and forceful, even visionary. I can confirm, having heard Valli speak in Rome last October at a conference during the Summorum Pontificum pilgrimage, that he is an extraordinary speaker. Aurelio Porfiri,  a musician and composer by profession,  has a more discursive and restrained style, featuring generous quotations from favored authors of conservative Catholicism, like Henri de Lubac  – but also from Romano Amerio. That is not to say, however, that Porfiri does not make his own pointed observations. What is common to both authors is that,  after having served the Church and secular media establishments for years in high positions, they have become determined critics of the present Vatican regime. Aldo Maria Valli, moreover, has turned decisively to Catholic traditionalism.

The writers’ assessment of the present situation of the Church is honest and bleak. The institutional Church has identified herself totally with the world. The Church speaks and acts exactly like the secular powers. “Nothing good for the soul can come from ‘shepherds’ who talk like the United Nations, are champions of political correctness and who embrace all the theories of the New World Order.”

Even though the Church cannot end, Valli states the Church as he had known it up to now is finished. The Church that may arise again will have nothing to do with hierarchy, the episcopal conferences and the dicasteries of the Roman curia. ”That ship has been wrecked and sunk.” As for the papacy, under Bergoglio, “the papal authority, already undermined, has received the death blow.” But Bergoglio is only the last link in a chain. Decisive for this realization of Valli’s was Amoris Laetitia and, even more so,  Traditionis Custodes. 

Valli describes his spiritual situation: 

The word that comes to mind is extraneousness. Look, I feel ever more estranged from the hierarchical church, from the shepherds – these shepherds! From their preaching, from their rites. Extraneous to all the so-called pastoral initiatives that live from empty slogans. Extraneous to the ceremonies which put at their center not God but man. Extraneous to sloppy and distorted liturgies. Extraneous to the conformism of the guardians of mercy….  

In such a dilemma, what can a Catholic do?  Here the authors draw on Ernst Jünger and his archetype of the Waldgänger (literally, “one who goes into the forest”). The Waldgänger is a combination of rebel, outlaw, and anarchist. Such a man asserts the truth in a dishonest world. The price of his personal integrity is exclusion from that world and immersion in the figurative forest.  Valli emphasizes that the Waldgänger is not fleeing, but making a manly choice of resistance,  “when by now it is clear that the institution has taken the path of betrayal and apostasy.” 

Valli does not at all see himself leaving the Church. “(Going to the forest)does not mean in my case abandoning the Church, but rather is a cultural attitude, by which everything coming from the summit of today’s Church, dominated by a humanitarianism which is confounded with that of the Masons, is decisively denounced, rejected, and refuted.“ Do we not see here some similarities with Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option and – even more so – his Live not by Lies? And does not the latter title in turn remind us of Solzhenitsyn and his colossal solitary struggle? We should also remember that Ernst Jünger became a Catholic a year or so before his death (at age 102)….

Aurelio Porfiri ends Twilight by quoting Joseph Ratzinger: a small rest (of Catholics) will remain, perhaps like those Japanese of the past, who lived their faith far from the (institutional ) Church but without separating from her.  So, Porfiri concludes, while we cannot say that a paradigm shift has happened in the Church it is taking place in ourselves, in those of us “who  take seriously the promises of the Man from Nazareth and sit here in the twilight, dispelling the darkness with confused actions while waiting for the dawn.”

Peter A. Kwasniewski

The Once and Futrure Roman Rite: Returning to the Traditional Latin Liturgy after Seventy Years of Exile

2022 TAN Books, Gastonia, NC

It’s no exaggeration to say that Peter Kwasniewski is the most energetic advocate of the traditional Roman Rite in America today. We have covered his many lectures and conferences on the site since 2015;  he is a familiar presence on the internet.  The books he has written or edited just since 2018 have been remarkable both in quantity and quality. In addition to all this, Dr. Kwasniewski is active as a church musician. Thus, his knowledge of the liturgy, both in the West and the East, is based in large part upon his own practical experience.  

The Once and Future Roman Rite is the most complete summary of Kwasniewski’s thought and advocacy on behalf of the traditional mass, for which he makes a passionate case. Dr. Kwasniewski’s tone can be intense, engaged, colloquial, even argumentative. He does not pretend to be a disinterested observer. But in this regard is St. Augustine’s City of God any different ?

The author first sets forth tradition as the governing norm in Catholicism. Tradition is not static but is, as the Newman explained, always involved in a process of organic development. Dr. Kwasniewski argues, however that the Novus Ordo can in no way be viewed as an organic development of the Roman rite. Its content has been largely changed and the basic features of the rite have been altered as well. Dr. Kwasniewski further argues that the traditional Latin mass and the divine liturgy of the East are much more closely related to each other then either of them is to the Novus Ordo. Kwasniewski profoundly disagrees with Pope Benedict’s “two forms of the Roman rite” solution of Summorum Pontificum – if that is to be understood not just as a political solution but as a statement of liturgical theory.

Kwasniewski finds support for his conclusions in a series of key addresses by Pope Paul VI between 1965 and 1969. Our author quotes them in full instead of taking selective passages to support foreordained conclusions. It is very clear from these documents that Paul VI  viewed the new mass as superseding the old, that it represented a revolutionary change, and that even the earliest so-called abuses (such as universal use of the vernacular or the discarding of Gregorian chant)were intended and modeled by Paul VI himself. This completely undermines the theories of conservative Catholics and other “reform of the reform” advocates who wish to dissever the Novus Ordo as it was created and imposed in 1969 from the conciliar documents themselves or from the post-conciliar magisterium of the popes.

Dr. Kwasniewski proceeds to a definition of a liturgical rite. He finds that the Novus Ordo is in no way the same as the Roman rite because:  the Roman canon is not used, mass is not offered in Latin, the liturgical texts are not recited or chanted, most of the prayers of the Latin mass have been eliminated or extensively reworked and reordered, a multi-year lectionary has been introduced, the calendar of the saints has been a severely reduced,  the traditional offertory  has been eliminated, mass is not said ad Orientem, the liturgy is celebrated in a sequential manner,  and the communions of the priest and of the faithful are mingled. Note that this description fits the Novus Ordo as it is usually celebrated, not unusual adaptations in favor of Catholic tradition such as we find in the Oratory churches in the UK.

Indeed, for Kwasniewski the presence (or absence) of the Roman canon is decisive.  A memorable chapter of this book is the author’s detailed analysis of the text of the canon and the theological meanings of each sentence. Kwasniewski argues that this ancient text inculcates a whole series of  theological truths that are downplayed or even absent in the Novus Ordo, e.g., that the Church’s unity and her other perfections are gifts for which we must pray to God; that the sacrifice of the mass is offered for Catholics who hold the true faith and they are its beneficiaries; that faith and devotion are prerequisites for participating in the mass; that we are protected by the intercession of the saints; and that there is divine predestination (only not in the Calvinist sense!). And the optional version of the Roman canon found  in the Novus Ordo – which is rarely used – has been altered in significant respects. Dr. Kwasniewski devotes a whole chapter to the fate of the mysterium fidei (the mystery of faith) in the Novus Ordo.

Dr. Kwasniewski believes the liturgical aberrations of today did not start with Vatican II and Paul VI but with the revision of the Holy Week ceremonies under Pius XII. For it was then, after 1948,  that the great themes of the liturgical revolution first received concrete application. It was with the changes to the Triduum that the modus operandi of centralized liturgical renewal was first consolidated.

In this book, depending on the subject,  Dr. Kwasniewski takes up the role of a theologian, a liturgist,  a historian, or a spiritual advisor. Parallel to his main arguments, he touches on a multitude of other issues and facts.  In so doing,  Dr. Kwasniewski is not afraid to clear up errors and misinterpretations that have gained currency among traditionalists – even if they support their cause.  This book is a gold mine of facts and arguments for the traditionalist seeking to better understand his own position and to respond to his adversaries.

The overall conclusion that Dr. Kwasniewski draws should be obvious: to adhere fully to the traditional Latin mass. In a sense, the pontificate of Francis has been liberating. The Catholic traditionalist no longer needs to feel any residual obligation to be a politician  –  the pope has clearly rejected that possibility. Thus, the only option remaining is to “do the right thing,” without any fear or hesitation. But wasn’t this conclusion already foreshadowed in the Heresy of Formlessness by Martin Mosebach (who has written a superb foreword to The Once and Future Roman Rite). When I reviewed Heresy almost twenty years ago what struck me was the universal application of the author’s arguments. The traditional mass was no longer merely an aesthetic pleasure, or a concession sought for by a small minority – it was a vital rule of faith than should be extended to the whole Church. So it is with Peter Kwasniewski. The traditional liturgy needs to be restored in full to the Church so that the Faith may flourish once again.   

When I heard the other day that the “pope emeritus,” Benedict XVI, had become seriously ill, I searched through what I and others had written about him over the years. But it was especially the illustrations to these writings,  the pictures of Benedict himself,  that I found moving. From the years of his papacy there were so many images of a kind, friendly, smiling man. In his dress and demeanor, he perfectly represented the dignity of his office as well as his own personal modesty. It contrasts with the disturbing images, deeds and revelations that emanate almost daily from the Vatican under the regime of Benedict’s successor.

A Theological Leader

In the 1950s Joseph Ratzinger commenced a career as an academic – always his first love. Early on he became involved in the progressive circles of the Catholic Church in Germany. He acted as part of the team that pushed through the documents of the Second Vatican Council. In retrospect,  Ratzinger never conceded any issues with his advocacy at this time, never felt any remorse at the effects of some of those decisions. Yet, he had been one of the movers in the revolution in the Church. At about this time he even took up a teaching position side by side with Hans Küng in Tübingen.

Very shortly thereafter, however,  his path diverged from that of the German Catholic establishment. By the late 1960s, as his major theological works were published,  he came to be seen by the orthodox minority of the German Church as a potential theological savior. Already people were turning with hope to him to find spiritual leadership in the midst of the growing chaos within both the Church and society.

By the 1980s he had emerged as the most articulate defender of the Catholic tradition within the establishment (and the hierarchy). In books such as the famous Ratzinger Report he acknowledged the damage inflicted upon the Church by disregarding Catholic tradition in the liturgy. This was a breath of fresh air. Indeed, Joseph Ratzinger was by far most effective as a theologian and spiritual writer. I know people (and have read of more) who have been inspired and even transformed by the reading of his books. His influence on priests was remarkable.

But in the 1970’s and 80’s he found papal favor as well, first from Paul VI,  and then from John Paul II.  For, as his “conservative” admirers had already discovered,  he seemed to offer both loyalty to the Council and reverence for Catholic tradition. In 1977 he was appointed to the prestigious see of Munich and was also made Cardinal. 

As Bishop and Vatican Prefect

We find, however, that Ratzinger early on encountered difficulties in a position requiring leadership and management skills. The best that can be said about his five years in Munich was that he was little different, both for better and for worse, than his colleagues in the German episcopate. Some of the decisions he took at this time later came back to haunt him (e.g., regarding a specific abusive priest or the “Catholic Integrated Community”). 

In 1982 he was appointed to the Vatican as the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and chief theological adviser to John Paul II). He remained in this office for the next 23 years. Both in his public statements and in behind the scenes advocacy he worked for the preservation of Catholic faith –  in theology, morality, and liturgy. 

As a professor in Germany,  Joseph Ratzinger had already attracted the hostility of the Church progressives. Their animosity intensified drastically during his service as prefect and, thanks to the media, spread far beyond the borders of his homeland.  The media depicted this kind, gentle and scholarly man ludicrously as a merciless authoritarian in contrast to the outgoing, warm personality of John Paul II.  A near riot would be staged against a lecture Ratzinger gave in New York. 

It seems that Joseph Ratzinger had sought neither elevation to the see of Munich nor his subsequent appointment to the Vatican. It is reported that he tried to retire from his Vatican office several times. Certainly, at the Vatican he insisted on continuing, in addition to his administrative duties, his scholarly writing and the interaction with his circle of students.  I get the sense from accounts such as those of Seewald that he remained isolated in the Vatican, failed to develop the contacts and networks necessary for getting things done in such an incompetent bureaucracy, and that the actual management of the affairs of the Church rested in other hands. He could not necessarily restrain John Paul II even in theological matters (e.g., the first Assisi meeting).

The Pope

Accordingly, it must have come as the greatest shock of all to Joseph Ratzinger to have been elected Pope in 2005. Benedict XVI,  in his Christmas address of that year, signaled that he wished to promote a shift in the culture or attitude of the Catholic Church and her relationship to her own past.  Famously, he advocated  a “hermeneutic of reform…in… continuity,” distinguishing it from a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.”  Yet, in practice, his implementation of this vision was extremely limited and fragmentary.  As for the liturgical reform of the reform, for example, Pope Benedict made only some timid gestures in the matter of the arrangement of candlesticks and crucifix on the altar and continued to promote exact translations of the liturgical texts. On the administrative level, he addressed some of the more egregious situations bequeathed to him by his predecessor ( such as the matter of Fr. Maciel and the Legionaries of Christ) and tried to start a reform of the curia and its finances.

Pope Benedict’s limitations as a leader became increasingly evident. His selection of associates in the Vatican was just as erratic as that of his mentor John Paul II; his management decisions were often inexplicable. His official statements could be disappointing; his encyclical on the economy had several luminous paragraphs, apparently written by him, buried in pages of meaningless verbiage. His political sensibility, in both theory and practice, was limited. Although a man of great musical and artistic sensitivity,  Benedict now and then celebrated Masses wearing vestments or accompanied by music of an ugliness and incompetence that were scandalous even in the opinion of  progressives. Pope Benedict found it difficult or impossible to directly confront opposition inside or outside of the Church  – even that in his own Vatican. On at least one occasion,  Benedict‘s own staff forced him to abandon his own decision – an abortive deal in 2012 for the recognition of the FSSPX. When the files are opened,  I would not be surprised to discover that this specific incident first led Benedict to consider resignation. 

Yet, in one case Benedict by his personal engagement overrode intense internal opposition  –  the hostility of the Vatican bureaucracy, the mainstream religious orders and much of the hierarchy –  to finally give freedom to the Traditional Mass. The implications of this were profound.  Benedict undoubtedly sensed that the prohibition of the Traditional Mass was only one aspect of an attempt to cancel (as we say today) the entirety of Catholic tradition. Furthermore, by assigning  the initiative for obtaining Traditional Masses in the laity, Benedict was putting his finger on the monstrous failure of the Catholic hierarchy,  bureaucratic or progressive or both, to respond to the needs of the Church today. It was even perhaps the first step in a reform of the centralized, ultramontane structures of the Church.  Associated with this action, Pope Benedict partially regularized the status of the FSSPX. Thus, Benedict sought to end the exclusion of Traditional Catholics from the Church and heal the resulting tragic divisions.  Yet Pope Benedict would not go further – he would not celebrate the old liturgy publicly as pope.

The Resignation 

After his election as Pope, the animosity to Ratzinger that had been building for decades exploded into outright hatred on the part of the clergy, academics and the secular news media. The assault on the pope now took on international dimensions as well. He was depicted as a fanatic, a persecutor, a mindless disciplinarian. He was indicted for triggering hatred towards Islam, for advancing “holocaust deniers,”  for trying to restrict birth control (condoms). No matter what he did, he encountered the same relentless drumfire from the media.

Clearly, insidious clerical circles, both inside and outside the Vatican, were also conspiring against him. His own butler betrayed him. Of course, we do not yet know the full story of what exactly happened in the Vatican in 2010- 2013, but it seems that Benedict finally had convinced himself that he could no longer effectively govern the Church. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that the pressure of an organized and treacherous opposition in his pope’s own curia played a decisive role in the pope’s stunning decision to resign.

It was a shattering blow to the Church and to Benedict’s personal mission of reconnecting the Church to her own Tradition. With the election of Pope Francis, moreover, the “pope emeritus” Benedict soon had to witness a regime coming to power that set out to undo everything he and John Paul II had done to preserve or even recover Catholic tradition. By his resignation, Benedict had jeopardized the labors of decades. As in the case of his actions during the Second Vatican Council,  however, Benedict was unable to acknowledge publicly that he had done anything wrong by resigning.  

As “Pope Emeritus”

In retirement, Pope Benedict resided in Rome for almost another 10 years – longer than the period of his active pontificate. Again, we do not know the details of all that happened during this period.  I don’t think we would be very wrong, however, to surmise that Benedict provided support, either directly or through his mere existence, to the forces trying to slow down the Francis revolution. The most obvious example of this was the book Benedict co-authored with Cardinal Sarah which undoubtedly played a role at derailing –  for the time being –  Pope Francis’s push for a married clergy and female deacons. Some very plausibly think that this incident was the genesis of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’s subsequent attack on the Traditional Mass – and accordingly on Benedict himself. Characteristically, as a media uproar ensued upon publication of this book, Benedict immediately tried to dissociate himself from its co-authorship.

The relentless hounding of Benedict by the media and the official Church continued throughout his retirement.  The new pope’s minions celebrated Francis as a liberator, as the new John XXIII, with Benedict playing the role of Pius XII. Benedict lived to see his sole major legislative accomplishment, Summorum Pontificum, abrogated and the reasoning behind it misrepresented by Pope Francis and his academic and media followers. A book was published (with some discrete Vatican input) depicting Benedict as an effete, eccentric aesthete obsessed with lavish vestments and ceremonies. In early 2022 there was yet another all-out attack on Ratzinger in Germany, this time in regard to how he handled the case of an abusive priest while archbishop of Munich. The renewed rage of the German media and the “German Catholic Church” against Benedict knew no bounds – a poisonous atmosphere to which Benedict contributed by various gaffes and misstatements.  Indeed, legal action was initiated against Benedict to obtain a kind of declaratory judgment against him for his management of this matter ( the case was dropped on December 31 after Pope Benedict’s death) 

Even after his death, the castigation of Pope Benedict continued.  The (official) German Catholic media seemed to damn him with faint praise (amid the obligatory platitudes). But we are also told, for example,  that he was a reactionary, that his theology no longer has any influence in the official German theological world.  In the United States,  the secular media accompanied the announcement of his death with sound bites summarizing Benedict’s reign as a series of scandals or describing his primary accomplishment as worsening ecumenical relations. 

A Spiritual Man in a distressed, fossilized Church

As a bishop, as prefect of a major Vatican Congregation and especially as pope,  Ratzinger’s accomplishments were more limited than his intellectual talents and spiritual vision would have led his many supporters to expect. Yet, this negative assessment is not at all the whole story. His pontificate may not have been successful; but were those of Paul VI,  John Paul II, and the current incumbent any more so?  In many respects, Benedict’s papacy appears to have been more positive than theirs. We have referred to his public style and external image –  dignified yet modest – forming such a contrast with the ceaseless self-promotion of Benedict’s successor (and predecessor)! We have mentioned his willingness to give to the laity the initiative in reclaiming the Traditional Mass – as opposed to issuing decrees from on high addressed to the clergy. And with Summorum Pontificum he took a courageous decision which his immediate predecessor had been unable to make. For, as a rule, John Paul II was content to adopt a passive, laissez-faire attitude to governing the Church. Paul VI and Francis, in contrast, have indeed been capable of taking actions that have shaken the whole Church. However, they could do this only because they enjoyed the support and prompting of the ruling secular powers of our day. 

Pope Benedict’s significant presence in the Church did not disappear with his resignation. We get a sense of the hidden influence that the “pope emeritus” exercised by comments after Benedict’s death in German–language media, both Catholic and secular. It is there asserted that now Pope Francis will enjoy greater scope of action, that he at last will be able to speak more directly on issues. The NZZ (one of the two main German-language newspapers) even entitles an article: ”After the death of Benedict XVI Pope Francis is now, for the first time, sole pope.”

The difficulties Benedict experienced as pope were not, however, primarily attributable to his acknowledged lack of leadership and management skills. For the fundamental faults of Benedict’s papacy were not personal to him but institutional. In my view,  the real issue of the Church is the need to respond to the spiritual void that had developed in the West since the 18^th century and to reconvert the people to the Faith. Yet, this intuition of the need for spiritual change and renewal contrasted sharply with the establishment’s simultaneous commitment to the “system” of the Church with all its attendant weaknesses:  bureaucratic complacency, lack of transparency, the avoidance of unpleasant problems,  eagerness to reach an easy accommodation with the world and its ideology.  

This contradiction became even more glaring under Pope Benedict, a man endowed with genuine intellectual and spiritual gifts. More than most Catholics,  he sensed that the Church was at the point of a great transformation – even a great trial or purification.  Yet, at the same time, he remained the quintessential man of the establishment: loyal to the Council,  devoted to academic bureaucracy, always taking great pains to avoid conflict (and the appearance of conflict)within the Church and trying to maintain a public facade of unanimity and harmony. To balance an intensely spiritual, dramatic, almost apocalyptic vision with complacent, even conformist practice was an impossible task, inevitably doomed to failure. But it was a failure Pope Benedict shared with whole Conciliar Church! The defects of Pope Benedict were shared by many; his virtues only by a very few.

There are far more enduring aspects to Benedict’s legacy. I see them every day in the great renaissance of the Traditional Mass movement, made possible by Summorum Pontificum. It is heartening that many priests and young people rediscover the full Tradition of the Catholic Church. These priests, religious and laity are now standing firm in their faith in the face of renewed attempt by the current Pope to exclude them from the Church and to eliminate Catholic Tradition. All this was a made possible by Summorum Pontificum, its implementing regulations,  and its predecessor indults. Pope Benedict either issued these or, as prefect, was involved in their creation. Moreover, it was Benedict’s ( or Joseph Ratzinger’s) writings that had helped to create broad awareness within the Church of the significance of liturgical issues in the first place. 

Outside of traditionalism in the strict sense, Benedict’s legacy also continues to inspire.  So many still discover “orthodox” Catholicism by reading the theologian Ratzinger’s works and addresses.  Benedict also authorized the Ordinariate of the Anglican patrimony which is enjoying success in some regions.  Even the reform of the reform seems to retain its adherents! We owe an immense debt of gratitude to Benedict for all this. In future generations the spiritual and intellectual legacy of Pope Benedict,  I am confident, will continue to be studied and flourish.

UPDATE: A clarification or correction to the statement above on the German legal procedure against Benedict. Although it had announced the legal action would be terminated upon Benedict’s death, the court said later that the case will continue against Benedict’s “heirs.” No such “heirs” have been identified, nor has any property of Benedict’s been found in Germany. So it is very unclear what will happen next. The entire purpose of this proceeeding is to rehash in public allegations embarrasssing to Benedict (or now, to his memory); monetary damages are reported to be precluded by the applicable statute of limitations.

The denigration of Benedict in his own homeland continues even after his death.

Below are relevant links from katholisch.de (in German).

Landgericht Traunstein: Verfahren geht gegen Erben Benedikts weiter.

Amtsgericht ermittelt vorerst keine Erben von Benedikt XVI.

As the nature of the policies of Pope Francis became clear, American conservative Catholicism quickly found itself in a grave dilemma. No other tendency within the Church had placed so much weight on loyalty to the papacy as the ultimate criterion of Catholicity. Yet the new pope, while insisting on absolute loyalty to his person, systematically rejected or reduced to a nebulous ideal everything for which the conservatives had fought: ”life issues” (especially opposition to abortion), alliances with evangelical Christianity, their opposition to socialism, liturgical abuses, “LGBT” and the entire progressive Catholic agenda. The pope regularly coarsely denounces revered conservative champions. (EWTN, for example, is claimed to be “doing the work of the devil”). And in the greatest humiliation of all for the conservatives, a hail of disparaging remarks and insinuations continued to shower down from Francis’s entourage on the Catholic Church in America and on the United States in general. All this commenced, of course, years before Francis launched his war on traditionalist Catholics. But even amid this campaign, in word and deed, Francis and his sycophants continue to make clear that all adversaries of the Left are also their targets. 

The conservative movement has been searching for a response. To their credit, few were able to follow the example of clerical institutions like Opus Dei and celebrate the steps the pope is taking against them. Instead, some conservatives simply withdrew into silence. Others surreptitiously shifted into a quiet alignment with the positions of the traditionalists, their erstwhile adversaries. Still others denounced the ever-increasing number of outrages in the Church while avoiding mentioning the Pope’s role in them.  I myself considered that, in view of this, conservative Catholicism had reached the end of the road, that from now on the landscape of the Catholic right would be dominated by traditionalism.

Indeed, the drift to traditionalism – or at least the openness to traditionalist thought – among conservatives has continued to progress. But I was a bit hasty in my expectations regarding the demise of the entire movement. After more than nine years of the reign of Francis, conservative advocates have returned to the secular media – as conservatives, but without the pope. They champion conservative Catholic issues – sometimes now even including the right to attend the Traditional Mass. But they are forced to argue without the benefit of reliance on authority. Let us look at some of their recent products.

Michael Warren Davis speaks of “us trads.” 1) He writes of the beauty of the Latin Mass. But what is exactly his position?  Although Davis claims to be a “trad,” his positions resemble much more closely those of a Catholic conservative. According to Davis:

As many of you know, there is a powerful clique of Catholic bishops who oppose the Traditional Latin Mass. ….Last year, Pope Francis published his apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes. It gave those anti-TLM bishops the excuse they needed to beginshutting down their Latin Mass parishes in their dioceses. 

That is the last reference to Pope Francis in Davis’s article. I don’t think many people would characterize the relationship between Traditionis Custodes  and the subsequent actions of the bishops in this manner.  The bishops’ enforcement actions are clearly the intended result of Traditionis Custodes and indeed reflect some coordination with the Vatican.  Of course, Davis earlier had propagated the utterly erroneous notion that Pope Francis had once been indifferent or even favorable to the Traditional Mass.

Naturally, Davis thinks whatever is happening now is largely the fault of the traditionalists themselves:

No doubt they (the anti-Traditional Mass bishops – SC) would cite the army of bloggers, vloggers, and Twitter trolls who devote themselves to castigating the hierarchy. And it’s true: some of these traditionalists say things about the pope that would make Martin Luther blush. So, if your only exposure to traditionalist Catholics came via the internet, you might agree that TLM is a bad influence.

Look: I’m the first to admit that there are problems in the Latin Mass community… I’ve bent over backwards to give our bishops the benefit of the doubt. 

I even have a soft spot for Cardinal Gregory…I have to believe that he truly loves Jesus Christ and His holy Church.

Why does Davis “have to” believe that?  Is he Gregory’s confessor? As he has done in the past,  Davis is denouncing those he is claiming to defend – and whose rights have been violated – while “bending over backwards” to excuse the establishment. 

So why does Archbishop Gregory do what he does?

There’s only one answer that makes any sense. Cardinal Gregory doesn’t understand the desire for beauty in worship.

So, you see, Gregory is just aesthetically challenged. Davis has a profound misunderstanding of Catholicism if he thinks all these people who sacrifice so much to attend Traditional Masses do so primarily because of the aesthetic experience. 

George Weigel, the grand old man of Catholic conservatism, argues in The Wall Street Journal for the “necessary” Vatican Council 2) However, he also signals his dissent from the views of the circle of the bishop of Rome:

Contrary to the claims of those votaries of Pope Francis who claim the Council instituted a “paradigm shift” in the Church’s self-understanding, John XXIII did not convoke Vatican II to reinvent Catholicism.

Pope Francis’s views on the subject are not explored further in this article.  But Weigel devotes paragraph after paragraph to the claimed original vision of John XXIII.  But how then did the problems of today’s Church arise? Weigel does, after all, frankly acknowledge the current catastrophic situation. According to Weigel, this is the fault of those (unnamed) individuals who abandoned John XXIII’s original intent to embrace secular modernity uncritically. In fact, much of Weigel’s article is a covert critique of the interpretations and policies emanating from the Vatican today. In this regard, it’s remarkable that Weigel does not mention the name of Paul VI. 

The traditionalists are, nevertheless, still utterly mistaken:

The more radical Catholic Traditionalists of our day seem to imagine that the Catholic bastion of the mid-20^thcentury could have sustained itself indefinitely. Thoughtful assessments of Vatican II and its legacy must acknowledge that the pre-conciliar Catholic past was more brittle and frailer after two world wars . and more vulnerable to the cultural tsunami of the 1960’s than some nostalgic traditionalist imagine. 

Weigel’s “thoughtful assessment” is just the usual list of calumnies against “radical” and “nostalgic” traditionalists as well as gratuitous assertions about the past.  I don’t think anyone on the traditionalist side today imagines that the pre-Conciliar Church was perfect.  But to make the claim – as George Weigel does – that the problems after the Council are (at least in large part) attributable to the debility of an already feeble structure seems to contradict empirical studies (such as those of G. Guchet ) and, in the case of some of us, the evidence of our own eyes. George Weigel seeks to disassociate himself from the “votaries“ of Francis yet his rhetoric here is virtually indistinguishable from theirs.

But in Weigel’s view what are the points of light of post-conciliar Catholicism? Where has John XXIII’s vision been realized sufficiently to support Weigel’s claims that the Council has been, at least in some places, a success? Weigel cites the progress of the African Church. But Africanization and the growth of the Church on that continent had been underway well before the Council – didn’t a certain traditionalist Archbishop have a key role in that? And under Francis hasn’t the African Church been regularly portrayed as an “adversary” of the Conciliar establishment? Then, Weigel speaks of the movements within the Soviet bloc and the emergence of John Paul II in Poland as fruits of the Council and specifically, of  the Declaration on Human Freedom. But Poland under Cardinal Wyszynski was viewed in the Cold War years as one of the most retrograde Churches, not as an exemplar of implementation of the Council.  John Paul II was after all the product Poland’s conservative, nationalist, even clerical Catholic culture. And when Weigel writes of the “self-liberation” of the Eastern bloc from communism I think that is more than a little exaggerated. Overall, Weigel can only assemble a highly selective and factually questionable historical summary to back up his narrative. 

We have covered in an earlier post a third example of conservative journalism: the announcement of the new Institute of Human Ecology at Catholic University – also published in The Wall Street Journal. 3) The  author, Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, however, focusses not on conflicts within the Church but on the Church’s potential role on politics and the secular world ( a subcategory of Catholic conservative thought).  In this article, too, the current pontiff and the hierarchy (except for Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles) are noticeable by their absence. Apparently the “dazzling intellectual tradition of the Church,” supposedly offering so much potential benefit to our world, is not necessarily best represented by the Church’s current leadership. 

Finally, Ross Douthat has written the most interesting of the pieces we are considering – dealing with the anniversary of Vatican II. 4) Douthat expressly claims for himself the title of “conservative.” His contribution, however, compared to those of his peers shows the greatest understanding of reality and departs farthest from prior conservative orthodoxy. He freely concedes that the Council has been, on its own terms, a failure. He acknowledges the problematic nature of the reign of Francis. Indeed, the very existence of  Pope Francis illustrates the failure of the conservative Catholics’ attempts over the years to contain the Council to a restricted and fixed set of provisions. Yet, like Weigel,  he declares that  the Council was “necessary.” Furthermore, it is “ irreversible.” I believe, though, that Douthat has na understanding of that word very much more nuanced than the Vatican’s. (Historical events, of course, can never be “undone.”) Nevertheless, these two terms serve to remove the Council from all rational inquiry. It is transformed into a scientific fact or even an article of Faith – much like Pope Francis’s statement in his letter accompanying Traditionis Custodes that to doubt the Council is to doubt the Holy Spirit. Thus, whatever Douthat’s reservations about the current state of the Church and its leadership may be, at the end of the day he defers to the irrational authority of the Council – even in the face of its failure. There is no way out.

This brief review shows that conservative Catholicism lives on even if deprived of what once was its most essential feature: reverence for papal authority. These conservatives of today acknowledge, to a greater or lesser extent, the post-conciliar disasters and losses. They can regret the persecution of traditionalists. Whether openly or not, they diverge in many respects from the current party line of the Vatican and do not rely on (current) papal authority. And at least in the case of Ross Douthat, they can even admit the failure of the Council itself. Yet despite all these insights,  the Traditionalists remain adversaries for them. Instead of seeking further reconciliation with the defenders of Tradition, these conservative authors inevitably take refuge in dogmatic assumptions which allow a return to the principle of institutional authority, at least in some attenuated form: Davis’s bishops acting in good faith, Weigel’s necessary Council as defined in the era of Pope John XXIII; the “dazzling Catholic intellectual tradition” of Picciotti-Bayer; and finally, Douthat’s necessary and irreversible, even if failed, Council.  Regardless of the continuing rapprochement between the two parties under the relentless pressure of Pope Francis’s regime, the divergence between traditionalists and Catholic conservatives regrettably remains intact.

1. Davis, Michael Warren, “Politics of Reason and Beauty,” The American Conservative (Sept. 29. 2022)
2. Weigel, George, “What Vatican II Accomplished,”  The Wall Street Journal (Oct 1-2, 2022)
3.  Picciotti-Bayer, Andrea,  “Counterfeit Catholicism, Left and Right,” The Wall Street Journal, ( 9/23/2022). My review is at “The Dazzling Catholic Intellectual Tradition” – the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University.”
4. Douthat, Ross, “How Catholics became Prisoners of Vatican II,” The New York Times (October 12, 2022)

We read much about the “Synodal Path,”  the “Synodal Church,” the “Synod on Synodality” and “synodality” itself.  Few, however, seem to have noted the remarkable agreement among all the actors involved in these events. The German Synodal Path supposedly was the product of the unique nature of the German Church: bureaucratic, historically antagonistic to “Rome” and enjoying the benefits of the Church Tax. Yet similar recommendations were soon forthcoming in France and Ireland. Then, the allegedly “conservative” Church of the United States issued its own “national synthesis” which has a surprising resemblance to the  positions taken by the Germans. For example, the USSCB summary found among the main issues facing the Church:

Closely related to the wound of polarization is the wound of marginalization :

Those who experience marginalization, and thus a lack of representation in the Church, fall into two broad groups.16 The first includes those marginalized who are made vulnerable by their lack of social and/ or economic power, such as immigrant communities; ethnic minorities; those who are undocumented; the unborn and their mothers; people who are experiencing poverty, homelessness, or incarceration; those people who have disabilities or mental health issues; and people suffering from various addictions. Included also in this group are women, whose voices are frequently marginalized in the decision-making processes of the Church: “women on parish staff said they felt underappreciated, underpaid, not supported in seeking formation, worked long hours, and lacked good role models for self-care.”17 The second group includes those who are marginalized because circumstances in their own lives are experienced as impediments to full participation in the life of the Church. Among these are members of the LGBTQ+ community, persons who have been divorced or those who have remarried without a declaration of nullity, as well as individuals who have civilly married but who never married in the Church. Concerns about how to respond to the needs of these diverse groups surfaced in every synthesis. 

Persons who have been divorced, whether remarried or not, often feel unwelcome within the Church. 

The hope for a welcoming Church expressed itself clearly with the desire to accompany with authenticity LGBTQ+ persons and their families. …In order to become a more welcoming Church there is a deep need for ongoing discernment of the whole Church on how best to accompany our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters. 

There was a desire for stronger leadership, discernment, and decision-making roles for women – both lay and religious – in their parishes and communities. 

Synodal consultations identified that more work is necessary to welcome diverse cultural and ethnic communities. 1)

This consensus extends not just across borders but up and down the chain of authority in the Church. The archdiocese of Philadelphia, for example, produced its own statement pf priorities completely in accord with those mentioned above.  Artwork arising out of those sessions in Pennsylvania was subsequently republished by the Vatican. In Rome, Cardinal Mario Grech has defended the German Synodal Path against is critics in other hierarchies.

Finally, the continuity extends across time as well as space. In 1976 the famous Call to Action conference was held in Detroit with the support and participation of senior members of the American hierarchy. In substance, its characterization of the issues facing the church resembles closely those of the synodal reports of today. 2) In Germany, the Würzburg synod held between 1971 and 1975 anticipated in many respects the current Synodal Path.

The number and specificity of the demands or proposed actions vary among these declarations, conferences and “processes.” But the underlying issues that are identified are generally the same. How can we account for this extraordinary unanimity? After all, hasn’t the Church throughout the world and over recent decades been characterized by tensions between conservatives and progressives, traditionalists and liberals? Yet, when the Church undertakes a project to “listen” to its base, only one perspective emerges, only one set of priorities is deemed worthy of comment.

One obvious fact is that in all these meetings, conferences and sessions the same people and the same institutions are involved. They are the bureaucrats who in fact run the Catholic Church, regardless of post-Conciliar talk of an empowered laity, subsidiarity or synodal government by the bishops. They include the teachers and administrators at the Catholic educational institutions, the journalists of the Catholic press, the members of the mainstream religious orders, the administrators of dioceses, the staffs of national episcopal conferences and the leadership of catholic organizations of every kind. The Roman curia, along with its related and subordinated entities, is itself one of the foremost examples.  Note that the administrators of the Church include (or form close alliances with) many not officially in the Church’s employ. Members of the “engaged” or ”activist” laity, for example, can be counted among the partners of the bureaucracy. Other allies have found a home as teachers or students at secular universities and divinity schools.  The publication perhaps most representative of the views of the Roman Catholic bureaucracy – the National Catholic Reporter – was specifically founded in the 1960’s outside the formal perimeter of the Church.

The make-up of the bureaucracy has shifted over the years – there are far fewer priests and nuns today in comparison to 1976 or 1966 – but that has hardly diminished its role. Most of the few religious sisters that remain no longer serve in schools or hospital but as administrators of one kind or another. Jesuits today rarely are able to staff their own schools and universities but direct and decisively influence their lay disciples who manage these places. 

The actual number of administrators has undoubtedly steadily increased.  Many bishops and diocesan priests also have come to understand their function to be links in a bureaucratic chain. Moreover, the bureaucratic tide is daily conquering new territory. Pope Francis has just decreed that laymen and women can lead Vatican congregations and dicasteries. A woman has just been appointed as akind of “deputy vicar general” in a German diocese. 3)

These bureaucrats and their hangers-on are the ones who select the issues to be addressed in the synodal process and formulate the “solutions” for them. Not even the ”1%” supposedly surveyed in the synodal process has had any real say in the matter.

This institutional stability is linked  with ideological uniformity. The ascendancy of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy, although its roots reach much further back, is really the product of Vatican II. For it was in the wake of the Council that the functionaries were empowered to assume the direction of the Church. They internalized and perpetuated the basic twofold nature of the Council: a revolutionary reaction against all forms of the past in Catholicism, combined with total openness to the norms of contemporary society. It’s easy to see how seductive such a message is for modern administrators. As against the laity and “reactionary” elements of the clergy they could pose as bold innovators in an ongoing, endless process of change. In relation to the  powers of secular society – both in and outside of the state – they could appear as accommodating fellow citizens of modernity. Therefore, at all times the Church bureaucracy has remained the guardian of the progressive vision.

These continuities in structure and belief within the Catholic Church reflect the consolidation of the modern civil society of the West and of its ideology. As in the case of the Church, the cultural and structural unity of the secular world extends over all Western societies (cf. Thomas Molnar’s Atlantic Culture). Moreover, just like the Church bureaucracy, the secular power elite includes both state (governmental) and private institutions and players. The Church operates within this society, and after the Council explicitly has looked to it for guidance. In secular society too, there has been continuity in ideology since the 1960’s, even if developments steadily assume a more and more extreme form. The “woke” ideology dominant today would have exceeded the expectations of all but a fringe of extreme radicals fifty years ago. But on such issues as support of unrestricted abortion the secular establishment has been consistent over the decades. 

Now the controlling influence of secular society is evident not only in the political and moral positions adopted by the Church administrative functions, but also in the very fact of the bureaucratic ascendancy within the Church. For is not the introduction of the managerial revolution one of the hallmarks of the contemporary world? Political conservatives have long lamented the deep state, impervious to political control and following its own agenda. A whole literature has arisen on these developments in the American educational system, where at every level the rate of growth of administrative staffs far exceeds that of both students and teachers.

Continuities of institutions, people, and ideology – all embedded in a supportive secular society – explain why the progressive Catholic vision has been so resistant to change – and now directs the synodal process. Catholic conservatives and traditionalists have been slow to understand or acknowledge these facts. Years ago, James Hitchcock wondered why conservative priests turn “middle of the road” or even progressive on becoming bishops. Others were amazed at how little headway the ideas of Popes John Paul II and Benedict seemed to make in the Church. The fact of Catholic bureaucratic continuity helps to clarify the situation. For those who dispute the consensus expressed in the synodal documents it will be insufficient to write grand speeches and articles and otherwise engage in intellectual debate. They must accept the necessity of relentless conflict with a concretely existing establishment holding all the power.   It’s a struggle that, in the short term, has no immediately foreseeable resolution.

In the long term, as we know, the outcome will be quite different.

1. “National Synthesis of the People of God”
2. Miceli, Vincent P., “Detroit: A Call To Revolution In The Church, ” Catholic Culture (1977).
3. Coppen, Luke, “Rome silent on German diocese’s appointment of lay ‘vicar general representative,” The Pillar ( Oct. 14, 2022)

I first encountered Daniel J. Mahoney when I reviewed his 2018 book The Idol of Our Age.  There he expressed guarded criticism of Pope Francis but still felt the need to “balance” his negative comments. In an article written for National Review two years later Mahoney was far more direct in his characterization of Francis. Today Mahoney is speaking out loud. After cataloguing with prophetic urgency the Vatican’s misdeeds in theory and practice,  he concludes:

 Today, papalotry is not an option for faithful Catholics. To fundamentally “change the Church,” as Francis surely intends, is to undermine her authority and her very raison d’être. The Catholic faith is not the religion of humanity, and the Holy Spirit is not an agent of the Historical Process, no matter what some Catholic progressives think. As with the Arian crisis of the fourth century, when most bishops succumbed to heresy, the task of Catholics is to defend the truth unalloyed. We owe the papal office filial respect. But no pope is an oriental potentate. His “private judgment” cannot take precedence over the moral law, the apostolic inheritance, and the unchanging teachings of the Church. Today, alas, unthinking papalotry reinforces theological and moral subversion. Self-deception of this kind only lead to the abyss. At this critical moment, Catholics have an obligation to see things clearly.

Mahoney, Daniel J., The Church over the Abyss. (Americanmind.org 9/20/2022)

Now Daniel Mahoney has done significant scholarly work on the legacy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for whom he professes great admiration. Pope Francis and Solzhenitsyn – these are mutually exclusive personalities:

“either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.”

Curious – I had just reacquainted myself with how another thinker, Thomas Molnar, had in 1980 been inspired by Solzhenitsyn (as opposed to any of the representatives of the official Catholic Church) in formulating his thoughts on the relationship of Church and State. Rod Dreher too has moved from the self-satisfied, quietist Benedict Option (2018) to a Solzhenitsyn-inspired assault on the current apocalyptic state of the West as exemplified by Live not by Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020). That transformation includes increasingly savage attacks on Pope Francis – for whom, by the way, Dreher had initially expressed admiration. For Dreher’s current views see, for example, “Pope Francis, McCarrick and Maciel” (The American Conservative, 5/29/2022). The prophetic voice of the great Russian writer lives on!

State and Church, “libertarian” and “truth-oriented” government – these topics once again stir up controversy. In the United States, by 1960,  Catholics were fantasizing that conflicts over such issues were, for them, a thing of the past. Since then, the government of the United States at Federal, state, and local levels has increasingly adopted policies overtly hostile to Christianity; thus, the debate – in the context of actual political conflicts – reemerged. On the practical level, we might cite the development and successes of the vast pro-life movement; in the realm of political theory there is the esoteric and specifically Catholic “integralist” discussion.

I think it might be of interest to turn back to Thomas Molnar (1921 – 2010) to shed light on the subject. He was a thinker who frequently dealt with the roles of both state and Church.  One of his few (the only?) books to have been reprinted in English since his death is The Church and the State: The Catholic Tradition as an integral Element of Western Political Thought (Cluny, 2018) – originally published under the more accurate title of Politics and the State: a Catholic View (Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago 1980).

I would not suggest this work as an introduction to Molnar’s thought. Much of it is the author’s critical confrontation with schools of thought from which Molnar seeks to distinguish the Catholic tradition – like the main strands of “conservative” political science in his day (Federalist, Straussian and “Voegelinian”) or an array of post-Thomistic political thinkers of the past, from Marsilius of Padua to Hegel. One does not find in The Church and the State the originality of Molnar’s pioneering works of the 1960’s such as The Decline of the Intellectual (1961) or The Counter-Revolution (1969). Nor do we encounter the passionate intensity of his increasingly savage dissection of the liberal ”civil society” now dominant in the US and Western Europe, as set out in a whole series of books such as Le Modèle Défiguré: L’Amérique de Tocqueville à Carter (1978) or The Emerging Atlantic Culture (1994). And a much more detailed discussion of the post-Conciliar Church can be found in The Church: Pilgrim of Centuries (1990). In contrast, The Church and the State has a more disengaged, abstract character. Many of Molnar’s arguments and opinions seem to me to be only sketched out or to presuppose the reader’s familiarity with his other works. Perhaps Molnar’s heart wasn’t in this book.  Whereas the other works previously mentioned focus on very concrete political, cultural, or historical situations, in 1980 the question of the relation of the Catholic Church – as it existed after the Council – to contemporary American state and society was of necessity highly theoretical. 

Nevertheless, the Church and the State, like any book of Molnar’s, offers a wealth of insights. The author, in marked contrast to our current integralists, avoids proposing “solutions” or a specific course of action. He is aware of the limited applicability of precedents from the ancient or medieval world to the unprecedented secular age of modernity. Yet he insists on the superiority of the Catholic philosophical tradition in analyzing the role of the state. Not unexpectedly, Thomas Molnar proposes the synthesis of ancient and Christian thought achieved by Thomas Aquinas as the standard for a Catholic view of the state.

This book is in fact largely a defense of politics and the state (as the original title implies). Both are natural to man. Indeed, the state derives its authority either directly or indirectly, through the people, from God. Yet, after Christianity, the state can no longer demand from the individual citizen total loyalty such as did the Greek polis. Similarly, although monarchy remains the preferred form of government – certainly in Aquinas’s judgment –   in Christendom the state also incorporated democratic features. 

The Church has an objective that is supernatural and primarily directed toon the salvation of each unique, individual person. Now the state is (or should be) oriented towards the temporal common good. It needs, however, the presence and cooperation of the Church to achieve these ends. But the Church as an incarnate institution also needs the state. Molnar views the two realms as coexisting in harmony. One is not subordinated to the other – but for the integrity of both a link must be maintained. Otherwise, despite its ever-growing size, the modern state drifts aimlessly, in subjection to the forces of contemporary civil society (the non-state, non-Church institutions). What form this connection should take and how is to be reestablished Molnar does not tell us. The Church’s “temporal power” or the overtly political linkage of “throne and Altar” from the age of Christendom have little or no relevance today.

”In contemporary pluralist societies, the power of the Church can only moral and spiritual, but it must so emphasize the moral and spiritual domain that it should be evident that society’s integrity and survival depend on it. The result would be a modicum of mundane power as well…..” (p.141)

Moreover, Molnar asks how the Church can impart moral direction to the state, when it too is in subjection to the same secular ideologies that dominate the state and society? At the level of the local national hierarchies, complete doctrinal confusion reigns – both in Molnar’s day and today. Molnar is somewhat coy on the role of the papacy.  But it is interesting – given his later views on the subject – that he does seem mildly optimistic in regard to the initial actions of Pope John Paul II.  It’s indicative, however, of Molnar’s overall judgment on the Catholic Church in 1980 that the contemporary Christian thinker he quotes most often in this book is not a pope, bishop or religious but Aleksander Solzhenitsyn (not Roman Catholic at all). 

For according to Molnar, it is above all through the action of the lay faithful that Christian influence on the state will be exercised. Moreover, Molnar sees a leading role for the laity in saving the Church as well. Indeed, as in many other issues, he was prophetic!  In the very year this book was published the Solidarity movement took off in Poland, And hasn’t the United States Catholic laity – collaborating with many others – achieved what was called impossible, the reversal of Roe v. Wade?  Counter-cultural Catholic political movements are active at this moment in Hungary, Poland and even Italy. I don’t need to tell the readers of this blog about the role of the laity in the traditionalist movement. With the exception of Solidarity, all these movements faced a hierarchy and Vatican that were ambiguous or even hostile to their aspirations.

Perhaps The Church and the State is too inconclusive and tentative in its conclusions – this book is no “manual” for action. But Molnar was aware of the complexities of politics and life, and of the chaotic situation both of the Catholic Church and of Western state and society circa 1980. 42 years have not improved matters. On the contrary – Molnar’s narrative of the dire moral challenges facing the Church from a state that has been subordinated to contempoary secular society reads like it had been written yesterday! And perhaps just clarifying the issues and freeing the discussion from the clutches of hostile ideologies is itself no mean achievement.