WHAT I THINK ABOUT THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH: The Catholic Crisis

...They may have come to believe, for example, that the full symbolic, even if not canonical, ecumenicity of a council requires the participation of all interested Christian bodies, not just of the Roman communion...

...As a consequence, non-Catholic church leaders, oddly enough, are now less likely to be attacked than Catholic ones...

...They did not, and do not, like to think of Catholicism as having anything which we lack...

...My instinctive sympathies are with Catholic reformers like Hans Kiing for whom the chief villains in the present turmoil are the church authorities...

...Younger Catholics even from devout traditional backgrounds know little or nothing of the novenas, benedictions, recitations of the rosary and cults of the saints which were the major affective com-ponents in their parents' religion...

...It is true that all institutions are under attack these days, but what has happened in Roman Catholicism is that the church authorities have unwitting-ly delegitimized themselves...

...Currant Catholic difficulties involve a special problem of legitimacy...

...the spirit and the letter of the Council...

...At the time of the Council, most of us who were observers thought of these equivocations as politically necessary, but of no great practical moment...

...Yet the difficulties are immense...

...There is no publicly persuasive way of showing who is the faithful Catholic, simply because the Council is equi-vocal on these and a whole range of other questions...

...Most of the Christian faith and vitality which persists is deeply embedded in ever more archaic traditional forms...

...Even total institutional collapse on the highest levels is likely to be transitory...

...I have said not a. word about what Arch-bishop Camara represents in Brazil, nor about the ex-hilarating conflict in Spain, npr the depressing one in Holland, nor about developments in Africa-to men-tion just four points which may prove decisive to world Catholicism and therefore also for...

...They have developed their transforming loyalty to the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ via some specific traditional interpretation of the Christian story, whether Catholic or Protestant, not by unmediated leaps into transcendence or into mystical or romantic interiority, nor even by jumping directly back to the Bible...

...The losses and confusion are great, but so is the hope...

...They also are in need of both updating and of a return to the sources, of greater relevance and greater faithfulness to revelation, of modernitas and Chris-tianitas...

...If a great schism were to occur, as happened in the middle' ages, they would be most unhappy...

...Catholics at this moment in history may rarely feel this way, but my impression is that the future of Christianity as a whole, to the degree that it has a future, is now bursting forth in a thousand often absurdly unexpected forms within the Roman Church...

...A basic consensus ranging from the people through the clergy and theologians to the bishops has not yet been forged...

...In their search for contemporary relevance or for Chris-tian faithfulness, they have undermined that popular, traditional, cultural Catholicism which, however, oppressive and obscurantist it may seem to the upwardly mobile, the educated elite and the biblical purists, is still the source of meaning and life to multitudes...

...Many in the lower ranks remained obedient, perhaps, but not so much to the current directives of the church leaders as to what they regard as even more authoritative, viz...

...What we need to remember is that the latter have, in most cases, personally interiorized the faith, not apart from their traditions, but in and through them...

...Eventually, in all likelihood, there would be ano-ther council like that of Constance in the 15 th century, and the schism would be healed...

...Most of the innova-tions will and should perish, but some contain the seeds of what is to come...

...The destruction • of these traditions, whether of fundamentalist revivalism or of Marian devo-tion, whether by modernization or by insistence on chemically pure Christianity, is also the destruction of the seedbeds of most of the genuine Christian vitality and authentic Christian faith which still lives in our world...

...It seems to me, as it does to them, that many of those who claim the progressive name have misused the Coun-cil as a cloak for innovative ego-tripping...

...Now, as an heir of the Reformation, my natural inclination is to want the bishops and pope to do even more than Hans Kiing asks, but I am increasingly skeptical that this would diminish the crisis...

...Almost against my will, I find myself in part persuaded by such "romantic conservatives" (I don't know what else to call them) as James Hitchcock and Garry Wills...

...It is this which makes the institutional crisis, the crisis of authority, so agonizing...

...It took that long or longer, in some regions, so historians tell us, for the Reformation's changes in worship to shape a new piety among the people...

...This live-liness is both pastoral and theological, extending both to the struggle for the personal reality of faith and for its intellectual formulation and understanding...

...For the foreseeable future, there will be millions and millions of people throughout the world who take pride in thinking of themselves as Catholic Christians as did their fathers and fathers' fathers back, in some cases, to the sixtieth generation...

...When it is, perhaps Catholics will have come to think that the solution of their constitutional crisis is inseparable from the tion of Ouitian unity...

...They use their religion chiefly as a security blanket, a legitimation and support for the way they already live, for the so-called values of an often reaction-ary version of the American Way of Life...

...This is not a modest view...

...Nothing in the non-Catholic world remotely compares in tragedy and comedy, both high and low, to the scene sketched in last spring's Time magazine cover story on the Jesuits...

...Yet there is also a minority of men and women who are intrinsically re-ligious, largely consisting, so the sociologists surprisingly report, of those who go to church and pray and read scripture most often...

...It is also, I would suppose, ele-mentary Catholic theology, now that the Council has made clear that the church is, first of all, not the insti-tution of salvation, but the people of God...

...The Roman Church does not endure first of all because of the papacy, but the papacy endures because its symbolization of universality and continuity exerts a powerful attraction on the imagination and emotions, wills and minds, of multitudes of human beings...

...The Catholic problem is also a non-Catholic problem...

...Even the more responsible among them, even the Council fathers, have done great damage, even if unintentionally...

...As a group, we Protes-tant theologians have little feel for what Paul Tillich called "catholic substance...

...That, indeed, is my reason as a Protestant for being concerned about it...

...It controls appointments and the purse, makes and un-makes rules and determines policy...

...We are inclined to forget that this principle is essentially a corrective which becomes de-structive rather than purifying when it has nothing sub-stantial on which to act...

...We tend to talk as if all that is needed is the "protestant principle" with its anti-- absolutism, anti-traditionalism, inconoclasm, secularism and liberationism...

...and how the Counter-Reformation sense of discipline is itself weakening...

...Given this starting point, a Protestant like myself can't help but be ambivalent about the last ten years of Roman Catholic history...

...Thus, like the old mass, the new liturgy is for most Catholics a duty rather than an experience...

...A pope who agreed theologically with Hans Kiing, for example, might well have every whit as difficult a time as Paul VI, except that now the opposition would shift...

...The Catholic ghetto provided the masses with group and individual identity, a sense of community, the dig-nity of belonging someplace amidst the anonymity of post-industrial civilization...

...To paraphrase what Luther said about the Bible, traditional religion, though often extrinsic and perverted, is the cradle of Christ...

...302-303...

...There are, to be sure, innumerable exceptions...

...As we come now to the end of this analysis, I am acutely aware of a great gap...

...This, then, is the perspective from which my thinking about Catholicism starts...

...Catholic consensus-buil-ding mechanisms are in greater disarray than in most other churches...

...They could have saved the church from crisis if only they had not been gradualists or reactionaries...

...the United States...

...I find myself worrying about this crisis precisely because of its effects on the people...

...Thus in attacking traditionalism,, the avant garde has often proved to be, not the proponent of Christian renewal, but simply die accomplice of contemporary Western liberalism and its elitist adherents...

...The am-biguities would give the pope and bishops greater free-dom in interpreting and implementing the conciliar de-crees, but the Catholic clergy, religious and faithful would remain obedient...

...People like Bill Buckley make it clear that conservatives also are able to refer to council, church, tradition and even the Bible against the pope or bishops whenever it suits their purposes...

...What I think about the Roman Catholic Church' Fifth in a Series THE CATHOLIC CRISIS GEORGE A. UNDBECK In what now seems the distant past before the Council ended, I published an article suggesting that the relation-ship of Catholic and Protestant is rather like that be-tween an occupied country and exiled freedom move-ments...

...Further, in long-range terms, it seems to me possible to be moderately optimistic about popular piety also...

...The strength also of Protestant churches rests on particular forms of traditional cultural Christianity...

...The Eastern Orthodox, when challenged, can take refuge in tradition, and the Protestants in past or future general conventions...

...At the same time that these revolutionary principles were enunciated, however, the old formulations were also repeated...

...Instead, they have tried to re-establish their native country abroad, alienated from the depths and continuities of culture and tradition from which they sprang...

...We could not have been more mistaken...

...Crisis spells, not only threat, bufr opportunity...

...The Roman Catholic hierarchy has no such recourse...

...When the supreme law of the land directly authorizes rival, perhaps contradictory, positions and provides no way of settling the disputes, conflict becomes inevitable and, unless changes are made in the supreme law, irresolvable...

...For them, substantially more fre-quently than for the mass of church members, religion is an often uncomfortable transforming power, freeing them in statistically reportable ways from the standard preju-dices of their milieu...

...Comparable equivocity would be a -recipe for disaster in any large and highly organized society...

...Es-pecially in view of the structural intimacy of the new liturgy, this will be the more likely to occur to the degree that the church declines in numbers and be-comes a diaspora, a scattered minority, in the world...

...Perhaps their lives were bedeviled with primitive taboos and superstitions, but the terror and beauty of the primitive are vastly prefer-able to the flat, moralistic reasonableness of liberal re-ligion, or the mechanical triviality, superficiality and sen-suality of commercialized American secularism...

...I have said scarcely anything of the immense vitality and creativity of contemporary Catholicism...

...Their authority is more Clearly legitimated...

...The difficulty, to repeat, cannot be resolved...

...If so, perhaps decades will pass before the basic institutional problem is finally resolved...

...They are without a, shepherd...

...It is best not," Kiing concludes one essay, "to flip an omelette step by step," and "One has to jump a stream if one wants to avoid getting wet feet...

...Very little is wrong that would not have been cured by jettisoning ancient rigidities' on such matters as birth control and clerical celibacy...

...In this case, however, the freedom forces have forgotten that the reason for their existence is to return to their homeland, a liberated homeland...

...The devotional practices which were its emotional-ex-periential core have swiftly disappeared or been down-graded since the Council...

...There are radical and fundamental ambiguities in the most authoritative of recent formulations, those of the Second Vatican Council...

...It would be dis-astrous to try in the near future to remove the ambi-guities of Vatican II...

...JWhat the First Vatican Council said a hundred years ago about the papacy, for example, were simply reiterated, inserted without modification or re-interpretation in what is a radically different vision of both church and world...

...They have ap-pealed to the Council to justify their own loss of faith, their mindless capitulation to modernitas, their devious and unacknowledged departures from what is essential, not only to the Roman tradition, but to Christianity itself...

...DLskussion urn Hans Kiing "Die Kirche," eds...

...Thus Biblicists, modernizers, traditionalists and papalists can all appeal quite consistently to this or that aspect of the Council's teaching, and can argue that the features they choose as primary provide the hermeneutical key for the interpreta-tion of the whole...

...It gave them access to glimpses of transcendence, apprehensions of the sacred, aware-ness of ultimate significance...

...As a result they are more prejudiced against blacks and Jews than the majority of non-churchgoers...

...The ranks of the pious contain the worst hypocrites-viz.-, the self-deceived ones-as well as men and Women of faith...

...Its sociological base in the immigrant sub-cultures is disappearing as Catholics move upwards and outwards in the social, economic and educational spheres...

...As long as they retain a strong sense of Catholic identity, institutional and theological collapse can be survived without mortal damage...

...H. Haring & J. Nolte, Freiburg: Herder, 1971, pp...

...Given a generation or two, the liturgical reforms may well be the source of a renewed and far more biblical spirituality...

...But illegitimate power is perceived as tyranny, and at point after point the bishops can't help but act tyrannically because they con-tradict what many in the church sincerely believe to be the import of the Council...

...It still has, of course, tremendous power...

...If you don't like what we do," they can generally say, "then get the next assembly to vote on your side...

...A precious part of their identity would be threatened, They would have difficulty in thinking of themselves as Catholic because there would no longer be an agreed-upon suc-cessor to the bishops of Rome with whom they could be in visible communion, along with Asians and Africans aflkl Europeans...

...A half-filled Catholic seminary is in my ex-perience often much more lively, as well as chaotic and frustrating, than a full Protestant one...

...Otherwise the traditions will continue to decline, increasingly unable to serve either the human needs of their members and of the larger society, or the im-peratives of Christian faith...

...Now it seems that the erosion of traditional piety is proceeding faster in American Catholic than in Protes-tant circles...

...The reformed liturgy does not seem to serve as an adequate substitute, in part, as Aidan Kavanaugh and many others have said, because it is in its essential structure a celebration of the intimate communion of believers with Christ and with one another, and simply does not fit in large parish settings...

...The ambiguities which I have in mind can be easily illustrated, Principles were laid down by Vatican II which theologically justify sweeping reforms in the struc-tures, procedures and goals of the church...

...This is simple elemen-tary social psychology...

...The Future This is an appalling prospect, yet it does not, in my view, justify the predictions of a Malachi Martin, for example, that the Roman Church as we have known itv will disappear before the end of the century...

...The Berrigans and their supporters can point to the conciliar social and political inter-pretations of the commandment of Christian love as authorization for their opposition to Vietnam, while their opponents can argue that tradition forbids, and the Council never specifically approves, the kind of civil dis-obedience in which the Berrigans engage...

...If this general view of what is happening has any validity, then the crisis cannot be solved, not even by a new pope, but only lived through...

...No Church, not evea the Roman, is fundamentally its hier-archy...

...This has happened in a rather precise, almost juridically precise way...

...The major excitement in the church these days is on the Catholic, not the Protestant side...

...Nine-tenths of the church members in America whether Protestant or Cath-olic are, in Gordon Allpdrt's terminology, "extrinsically religious...

...I think first of the people, the religion of the masses, for that is where the strength of any church lies...

...Common Malaise When looked at in this way, the Catholic crisis appears, not as an isolated phenomenon, but as an acute form of a malaise common to all the historic Christian tradi-tions...

...Thus, articulated convictions seem to be draining out of popular Catholicism much as they have out of liberal Protestantism, and this is rather more dangerous for the Catholics because they have no remaining, coherently organized mass of traditionalists to recruit from as liberal Protestant denominations have recruited and may expect to continue to recruit from conservative ones...

...What might be called a constitutional crisis has erupted...

...It is no more modest, though I hope more self-critical, than De Gaulle's atti-tude towards Vichy France...

...Therein lies the problem...

...This would generate an enormous and lasting popular pressure on the leaders-who would be leaders of nothing without the people-to settle the dis-putes...

...Another council will in all likelihood eventually settle the constitutional question, i.e., the question of how to interpret Vatican II, just as the Council of Constantinople quieted the storms raised by Nicea, and Chalcedon by Ephesus...

...Similarly, individualistic other-worldliness is juxtaposed rather than joined with a cosmic and communal eschatol-ogy which makes the humanization of social and cultural structures a primary Christian duty...

...Nevertheless, as could be expected, a good many of my fellow Protestants thought that it manifested an inordinate lack of self-esteem...

...Hans Kiing can insist that the Council's emphasis on the Bible de-mands a thorough review of the doctrine of infallibility, while his critics reply that the biblical emphasis must be understood in the light of tradition, especially the tradition of Vatican I, rather than the other way around...

...This settlement, however, cannot be rushed...