NEWS & VIEWS
NEWS & VIEWS Pepe Pmul Vi Looking back, I don't believe Pope Paul VI ever had muchstandingwith"our crowd." I remember arriving midway through Session 2 of Vatican II and inquiring...
...He hadn't set theChurchonanynew course, but paradoxically, he was bequeathing a different type of Catholic to history...
...Andrew Greeley's studies confirm all too painfully the consequencesonAmerican Catholicism...
...Our children will seemarriedpriests;our grandchildren, women priests --maybe.Mostassuredly, they'll see sexual codes refined so that what is now dogmaticallyunacceptable will one day be acceptable...
...It was a brave and honest gesture,asCliffordLongley wrote in The Times of Lon-don on Paul's death, but, as he added, it was likewise an unprecedentedmisjudgment of vast consequences...
...Many of Paul's decisionswill be altered or completely reversedbysucceeding popes,beginningwiththe new one, and I expect he lived uncomfortably with the knowledge...
...Paul's was a no-win situation...
...The question was a joke...
...As John Courtney Murray reportedly obse~ed, Paul reached muoh too fax on muchtoo tittle knowledge...
...I remember arriving midway through Session 2 of Vatican II and inquiring of "ourcrowd"aboutpapal audiences...
...Paul's was a middle way ---sometimes ambiguous, always cautious...
...this and morewouldnotwinthe hearts of "our crowd...
...Johnsawsomethingof what was coming and VaticanIIwashisresponse...
...This attitude infected me for a while...
...When I finally did take myself to an audience, I went alone, quietly...
...The dayofinstinctiveobedience to authority is gone...
...It was a policy that alienated people across the ideological spectrum, but it probably kept the Church in one piece, however eventually frayed...
...Social encyclicals more advanced than John's(Note how deep the roots of liberation theology are in Popu-" lorumProgressio...
...Our crowd," on the other hand,hasgenerallyfound this same thought quite congenial.Theliberatedconscience,informedanddisposed to act responsibly, has always been a grand liberal concept.Thusthefurther paradoxthat"ourcrowd" actually is in debt to Paul in a way that many don't yetrealize.Hefreedthe Catholic conscience from its stateofreflexobedience...
...The surface impression is that for many of them not much...
...Paul was an easy pawn, sometimes, to be sure, of his own making...
...The latter development will makeiteasierformany Ca~.holics to be Catholic in an orthodox sense, but it is not going to return the Church to whatit was.Humanae Vitae guarantees that, again by ~the damagedoneauthority, but no less significantly by the impetus it supplied within Catholicism to the " principleofprivate judgment, as understood in itsProtestant(asdistinct from Catholic)sense...
...extensive structural and liturgicalreforms;imaginative adjustments to the realities of Eastern European Communism(Recallthe Mindszenty affair...
...Tobefairtomycolleagues, Paul was often his own worst enemy, and alas, hedeservedmuchofthe press that he received, particularly around the time of Humanae Vitae...
...Indeed...
...How much "our crowd" changed over the years, I'm not sure...
...Paul could have been an unmitigateddisaster,you know.Hecouldhaveacceeded to the strong conservative elements in the Church ---theOttavianis,theLefebvres--and run the Church agroundontherocksof 19th-century reactionaryism...
...Or he could have accommodated the expectaxions of the liberals--the bulk of them at least--and the Church would likely haveexplodedfrom the uncontrolled interplay of forcessuddenlyletloose within it...
...thento guide the Church throughthecurrentsof change with a minimum of seasickness...
...Of course Humanae Vitae undercut papal and ecclesial authority.OfcourseHumanaeVitaedrovemany Catholicstounorthodoxies previously unthinkable.But the times took their toll too...
...The Catholic Church doesn't exist in a cultural or political vacuum...
...There was no way that it was going to evolve on its own terms, at its own rateofspeed,whenthe world around it was changing so drastically on many of thesameissues thatconfronted Catholicism, including sexual morality, feminismand social justice...
...Classify this happenstance, if you will, under "S"mfor serendipity.Crossfileunder "G"for gratias...
...He had to fill shoes that he, along with the rest oftheworld,knewwere unfillable.Andhe hadto give order to change in a Church where change was a stranger.Complicatinghis task was a secular world in radical flux...
...it wasn't what he intended, but there conscience is nonetheless:Free.Thisisno small legacy...
...This, I think, is why history will give Paul a passed...
...Papal audiences were fortourists.Besides,Paul wasn't John, and the action was in the aula...
...now positive, now negative...
...All that notwithstanding, I think history will deal much more gently with Paul than "ourcrowd"didduring much of his pontificate...
...It's a whole new situation in RomanCatholicismwhere conscience is concerned...
...ecumenical breakthroughs...
...HumanaeVitaewasa gaffe, no doubt about it...
...Paul's challenge was to see Vatican II to a Johannine conclusion--whichhedid...
...NEWS & VIEWS Pepe Pmul Vi Looking back, I don't believe Pope Paul VI ever had muchstandingwith"our crowd...
...You didn't go to a sandlot game in the BronxwhentheYankees were at the Stadium...
...He could not have found the idea congenial...
...Well, there was a lot of seasickness, but I'm not sure that it would have been much better with a lot of other men as pope...
...I suspect Pope Paul knew this, and it was another reason why he wore his anguish like a maniple...
...R..I.P.JOHNDEEDY 1 September 1978:546...
...travels worldwide...
...And, of course, he blew the birthcontrol issue...
...He made the best of an impossible situation...
...There was no redemptionafterHumanae Vitae...
...I had a feeling almost of slinking off...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 17
