Papal Power

...Very disturbing to those who treasure church social teaching will be Vaillancourt's assertion that the actual exercise of international ecclesiastical authority functioned for "the legitimation of the neoliberalism of Christian Democracy and for the defense of the privileges of the Vatican in Italian society...

...Vaillancourt's book is groundbreaking in sociology of religion in its focus on two, little-studied, areas: (1) the control or power mechanisms available to channel lay participation under clerical elites...

...This study is unique in providing a sociological profile of these elites...

...I suspect that greater nuance will not totally invalidate the general thrust of Vaillancourt's strong and compelling thesis...

...Vaillancourt also decisively overstates the commanding role of the center visa-vis national church settings...

...Those who nevertheless do speak out lose their legitimacy, since they are immediately removed from office or, if that is impossible, their organization is isolated and stripped of all official standing...

...He discovered that to understand the dynamics of that congress he needed to probe deeply into the factions within the Italian Catholic Action movement and the Christian Democratic Party and their interaction with members of the Vatican bureaucracy...

...Early on in the book, Vaillancourt poses his key question: "Is the interest in the laity on the part of the Vatican and the episcopate (through Catholic Action, Christian Democracy and certain organizations for the lay apostolate) directed toward mobilizing the laity in the defense of the interest of church authorities, or toward the sharing of power and increasing of grass-roots participation in the decision-making processes of the church...

...Consequently, the essential Sitz im Leben for interpreting many pronouncements to and for the universal church is a very local church indeed...

...His is only a partial truth...

...universal, loses much of its value when the so-called universal church is so deeply involved in local Italian issues...

...International Congress of the Laity...

...To explore these hypotheses, he marshals three strands of evidence...

...laymen who keep waiting to be in a secure position to speak out never get to that position because the Vatican does not permit such an occurrence to come about...

...Vaillancourt summarizes this data by asserting that "The chief demands are not for relief from traditional moral prescriptions but for a series of new opportunities to participate in the functioning of the church...

...The major theoretical contribution of the book consists in a typology of eight different kinds of power or control mechanisms available to churches (ecological, remunerative, coercive, social, legal, traditional, expert and charismatic power) whose usages Vaillan-court amply exemplifies A central chapter presents data based on a questionnaire distributed to lay elites at the Third International Congress of the Laity...

...Again, much of the historical evidence he ad-duses is patient of a different, more nuanced, interpretation, e.g., concerning the silence of Pius XII on the Jewish question (cf...

...Vaillancourt has grossly overstated his case in respect to social Catholicism, although Since the Vatican gives the laity statuses that are tentative and limited in time (and dependent for their perpetuation on the "good conduct" of the incumbent...

...Clearly, the dyad, local vs...

...John A. Coleman Books: ONE, HOLY, ITALIAN, & APOSTOLIC JEAN-GUY VAILLANCOURT, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Montreal, has written an intriguing, controversial, learned and lively book...

...Most damaging, in my opinion, is Vaillancourt's total neglect of the evidence for a shift in Vatican policy on political involvement since 1971 in response to "the coming of the third church...

...The pope is, simultaneously, Bishop of Rome and Primate of Italy...

...He is surely too centered on Europe and Italy, whatever the large merits of his thesis that much of papal power has been about Italian politics...

...One might very well say it has to do mostly with the Italian political situation...

...The basic flaws in Vaillancourt's account stem from the very ambition of his endeavor...

...Significantly, this latter organ is entirely staffed by clerics...

...2) the interaction between the international church bureaucracy and the new demands put forward by laity involved organizationally at the supradiocesan level...

...He lapses sometimes into errors of fact (e.g., an assertion that there are already married priests in the Latin rite) or overblown rhetoric (the Vatican as a tool of "American Imperialism") which will tempt biased readers to dismiss the bulk of his real evidence...

...There has never been an authentic, autonomously local Italian Catholic church...

...The merit of this book is that it is unique in the sociology of religion for systematically exploring those political and socio-economic pressures on the Roman curia and their consequences for social policy yis-a-vis church-sponsored lay movements in the world church...

...Its central focus is the Vatican's control over the laity during the pontificate of Paul VI...

...through the condemnation of Murri by Pius X, which cut off the possibility of a Christian Democratic People's Party...

...Vaillancourt's method is a nuanced and non-dogmatic Neo-Marxist approach to the study of religion...

...inter-alia Anthony Rhodes, The Vatican in the Age of Dictators...

...Clearly, Catholic Action-to take one example-had quite different contours in the Netherlands, Belgium and France than in Italy...

...First, he rehearses papal directives for the world church about lay involvement from Pius IX through Paul VI...

...Less familiar to most readers will be the accounts of Paul VI's close alignment with the Dorotei group in the Christian Democratic Party, that group's interlocking directorate in Italian politics, finance and world church movements, and Paul VI's flip-flop on the issue of an opening to the left in 1976 (spawning pronouncements with reverberations on the universal church, beyond Italy, for Latin America and Eastern Europe...

...Vaillancourt set out, in 1967, to study the international lay Catholic elites who attended the Third (and, seemingly for some time to come, last...

...Jean-Guy Vaillancourt Papal Power his evidence is strongly persuasive on the issue of Vatican manipulation and control of lay elites...

...This study led him to conclude: "What is papal power all about...

...On the basis of Vaillancourt's evidence it is very difficult to escape his conclusion that the Vatican did not encourage or tolerate any real grass-roots autonomy and participation in the church on the part of an independent laity...

...This sample singled out, in its response, four areas of complaint: (1) The bishop and his co-workers are inaccessible to laymen and women...

...strong and compelling thesis...

...The chosen Neo-Marxist perspective, legitimate and illuminating in itself, foreshortens Vaillancourt's vision so that he misses important aspects of social Catholicism which are not, simply, ideology...

...One also finds a church with universal pretensions mired in very local, often parochial, political concerns...

...Underneath the religious facade, one finds a lot of earthy politics...

...It combines a mixture of historical, empirical and theoretical perspectives to cover the history of lay movements since the beginning of the church and, more particularly, the mid-nineteenth century...

...Papal Power is an ambitious book, perhaps overly so...

...3) Lay activities are dominated by the clergy and (4) Lay initiative, even if undertaken in the spirit of the Council, is not rewarded or recognized...

...The third strand of evidence is an account of the movement to involve the laity after the First International Congress of the Laity in 1951, through the Second and Third Congresses, and the formation, first, of a non-curial Council of the Laity and, finally, the Pontifical Curial Council/or the Laity (established December 16, 1976...

...It is my hypothesis that the first alternative fits the evidence rather more than the second...

...2) Parishes are too large and impersonal, thus reducing the possibility of spontaneous community...

...to Pius XII's pre-war "tilt" toward Fascism over Communism and his postwar espousal of an anti-Communist Christian Democracy...

...This is juxtaposed with papal involvement in Italian politics, from the non-expedit of Pius IX...

...the Vatican abandonment of the Popolare Party to accommodate the concordat policy of Pius XI...

...It deserves a careful reading and assessment by anyone interested in papal politics, social Catholicism or the role of the laity in the church...

...But anyone who desires to give an alternative account of worldwide social Catholicism and the involvement of the laity in church decision-making (the attempt to block effective lay involvement is the single most important cause of the failure of social Catholicism to become anything more than a beautiful, if ineffective, vision) will have to include Vaillancourt's perspective and his-to any social scientist-rather obvious assertion: "The use of power in a religious organization like the Catholic church is determined in good part by political and socio-economic pressures as they are mediated through the ideology and the interests of the top leadership and especially the central bureaucracy of that organization...

...Gramsci was right...