The Desolate City
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
THE SEARCH FOR TRADITION THE DESOLATE CITY REVOLUTION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH Anne Roche Muggeridge Harper & Row, $16.95, 219 pp. Lawrence S. Cunningham Conservative Catholics have produced a...
...Such a gesture would emphasize the role of the priest as a mediator between congregation and God...
...I warn her, however, that such deviations are hard to root out...
...She prefers Protestant Revolution to Protestant Reformation...
...The basic problem with this book is not that it is a conservative critique, but that it is so deficient in its sense of history, so simplistic in its understanding of the Catholic tradition, and so drenched in nostalgia for a period in the church's history which is, for better or worse, long gone...
...Where we part company is that she sees lesbian nuns telling and the other epiphenomena of the present-day church not as a sign of silliness, but as the essence of renewal, but as the essence of renewal...
...there is much evidence that such modernist architectural arrangements were also common in the sixth-century churches of Ravenna...
...The axe-grinding, by the bye, would be less odious if it were not done by maligning the names of good and honest persons...
...It is a scandal that for centuries popes have stood under Bernini's baldachino facing the congregation when saying Mass...
...I suggest that Muggeridge encourage her friends in Catholics United for the Faith to mount yet another letter-writing campaign to demand that this be done...
...Martin's Press, 1980) where one finds analysis instead of axe-grinding...
...Towards the end of her book Muggeridge makes an impassioned plea for a deeper sense of the pre-Vatican II church...
...Her treatment of Father Raymond Brown (whose first Mass I served more than thirty years ago), a member of the Vatican's biblical commission, is ignorantly malevolent...
...Those who feel a visceral sympathy for a conservative critique of recent events in the church would do better to read a more sophisticated account like the little noticed work of William McSweeney entitled Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance (St...
...She would agree with John Ford and Germain Grisez that the ban on contraception could (and probably should) be papally defined in an infallible pronouncement...
...the current travails of Hans Kiing, Leonardo Boff, and company please her almost as much as the limited right to use the Tridentine rite of the Mass recently granted by Pope John Paul II...
...it would also mitigate the current tendency to see the priest as simply the president of the liturgical assembly...
...She then says that one small step, symbolic but crucial, would be to turn the altars around and have the celebrant once again face God instead of the people...
...I say that because I can feel a sort of empathy for her deep distress at the loss of the Latin Mass of her youth, the callousness of heavy-handed "reformers" in their mania for the new,- and the more baroque manifestations of dissent and/or rebellion...
...To these, and heavily dependent on their writings, we must now add the voice of Anne Roche Muggeridge, the Canadian-born daughter-in-law of the great Malcolm...
...we lived through both the old Catholic order of things and were spectators/participants in the aborning of the post-Vatican II church...
...while admitting to a bit of overzealousness, she applauds the crackdown on modernists at the turn of the century...
...Far more distressing than that is Muggeridge's persistent willingness to 58: Commonweal misstate what scholars say (her grasp of theology is, let us say, a tad thin) and then, on the basis of that misstatement, to derive consequences from it...
...Let me cite one specific example...
...She claims that the ¦'modernist" biblical scholars of today reduce the resurrection to a subjective experience of the early disciples...
...Later in her book she uses this assertion to insist that nobody would live in fidelity to a religious vision based on subjective religious experience...
...She gives us a rather lengthy review of the matter because if offers an opportunity to indict the German theologians (notably Bernard Haring), scold the late Paul VI for a lack of toughness, and praise the current pontiff for his use of this doctrine as a touchstone of orthodoxy...
...They are chroniclers of liberal horror stories mined from the pages of The National Catholic Reporter (James Hitchcock), lamenters of liturgical decay (Louis Bouyer), investigators of transalpine conspiracies against Rome (Ralph Wiltgen), or demanders of an injection of steel into the compliant spines of the bishops (George Kelly...
...Muggeridge, who reluctantly concedes that the documents of Vatican 11 admit of an orthodox reading, is an oldschool Catholic...
...She either knows that and misrepresents them or she has not read the people whom she excoriates...
...The problem is that the alleged modernists she cites (Raymond Brown, Pheme Perkins, Edward Schillebeeckx) to a person all explicitly deny that the resurrection was a purely subjective experience...
...Then, as they say in the Deep South, liberals would have to fish or cut bait...
...30 January 1987: 59...
...Like Andrew Greeley, but reaching far different conclusions, Muggeridge sees the Humanae Vitae controversy as the signal event of the post-conciliar church...
...My guess would be that she and 1 are roughly of the same age...
...In fact, she sees those latter events as the first signs of the coming counter-revolution to restore sanity to the church...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham Conservative Catholics have produced a number of books since the watershed events of the Second Vatican Council, documenting what they see as the excesses of the liberals and urging corrective action...
Vol. 114 • January 1987 • No. 2
