INTERPRETING VATICAN II
Hitchcock, James
VERSION ONE A continuum in the great tradition James Hitchcock Are rival interpretations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic history vying for our attention and making...
...But this process does not finally result in a solid, permanently valid core of belief, and each age discovers still more things that must be discarded...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...questions which modernity itself has found it impossible to answer and which postmodernity has declared inherently meaningless...
...But liberal Protestantism ends inevitably in the corrosive skepticism of the Jesus Seminar and of Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, in the "death of God" theology, in a deference toward other religions which makes it now impermissible to affirm the primacy of Jesus Christ...
...The movement included people like Alfred Loisy, whose beliefs could hardly have been reconciled with Catholicism under any circumstances...
...If religion provides history's most notorious examples of a hypocritical gulf between proclamations of love and practices of hate, "progressive" political movements rank second only because they do not have nearly so long a history...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...Johnson's failures to contextualize the pope's thought within its corpus as a whole and to understand the purpose of a catechetical address seem to be at the root of his embarrassingly off-base criticisms and misunderstandings...
...It is not coincidental that the council's decree on the church, Lumen gentium, is itself "triumphalistic" (the church as the light of the world) and reaffirms Vatican I's teaching about papal authority...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...But that enterprise has proved chimerical...
...But such a judgment is historically naive if it treats these great historical eruptions merely as abstract ideas, ignoring the cauldrons in which they were brewed...
...But it is also a claim of senior partnership on the part of the church...
...Nominalism was an accepted theological school...
...Consistent ethic Luke Timothy Johnson does offer some salient points in his critique of Pope John Paul II's theology, which he describes as "abstract" and idealistic...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...But even in his analysis, a dismissal of current theology would have to involve a serious attempt to confront the realities behind the church's teachings...
...Thus also the council's best known rapprochement with modernity—Dignitatis humanae—rests upon a classical understanding of human freedom and dignity...
...Since Alleva's own concerns have to do with the verisimilitude of the Left Behind series as thrillers, he is certainly entitled to be selective in his quarrels...
...Finally, in regard to the Theology of the Body, I found one of Johnson's principles rather hard to accept: "Human bodies are part of God's image and the means through which absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us...
...Robert Bellarmine was right to warn Galileo that he should not insist on the truth of the heliocentric theory because at the time (and for some time afterwards), it was an unconfirmed theory...
...Gaudium et spes is accommodating to modernity mainly because it refrains from mere condemnation and offers instead a hand of friendship...
...Roger Landry and Jennifer Popiel offer testimonies concerning the joy brought to couples who are introduced to papal teaching on sexuality or who practice natural family planning...
...God will hear you...
...Pius IX saw liberalism not as a humane abstract idea but as a movement which proclaimed liberty and in practice threatened the church's very right to exist, just as the Enlightenment had proclaimed freedom and tolerance but helped prepare the way for the French Reign of Terror...
...Carroll's irony The ultimate irony of James Carroll's theories [see Robert Wilken's review of Constantine's Sword, "Dismantling the Cross," Janurary 26] about the inevitability of Christian anti-Semitism is that those Christians who risked their lives to save Jews did so not in spite of their faith but because of it...
...To summarize Egan's main points: In version one, Vatican II, meant to complete the work of Vatican I, was distorted by various secular and cultural ideologies...
...An old woman on a crowded trolley in Warsaw, at a time and in a place where one could trust almost no one, replied to the anti-Semitic diatribe a fellow passenger was delivering by saying, "Hush up...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...By the way, though certain passages of the book of Revelation are commonly used to support interpretations of the Rapture, the notion itself is drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4:17...
...If natural family planners, surprised by pregnancy, are then open to God's will concerning a birth, why should we assume that those using condoms who are surprised whould then seek an abortion...
...Paul Hottinger asks why I don't work at all this stuff I said needed doing, since the pope is a busier guy than I am...
...The liberal churches do not reserve to themselves any final right to pass judgment on modernity, and any reservations about its unfolding are automatically deemed obscurantist...
...It exists to ease its adherents' way into secular modernity...
...When a "modern" artist becomes a believer he ceases to be modern in the true sense...
...I think perhaps with more admiration about an incident recounted in a letter to the New York Review of Books by an Israeli who survived the occupation of Poland...
...In the context of the time, movements which favored decentralized ecclesiastical authority, like Gallicanism, were dangerous even to those who espoused them, since a strong papacy was necessary to provide local churches with the resources to resist (Continued on page 18) 16 (Continued from page 16) secular encroachments on their liberties...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...In contrast, version two rests on a more positive attitude toward modernity and liberalism...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Jeffreys connects my poor grasp of the pope's overall position with my suggestion that the church may be in danger of colluding in genocide...
...In "Continuing the Conversation" (September 8, 2000), Robert Egan asked the question and called for a public discussion of the two interpretations that have emerged from antagonistic understandings of Vatican II and the upheavals that followed...
...But if there is anything which is unquestionably modern, it is pervasive technology, and, to the extent that the environmentalists' criticisms are justified, they serve as warnings to the church precisely not to accommodate itself to what seems progressive in each new age...
...Disappointed As someone who believes in Humanae vitae but also agrees there is room for further development in this teaching, I found Luke Timothy Johnson's essay disappointing...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Commonweal put the questions independently to two historians, James Hitchcock and John W. O'Malley...
...THE EDITORS The appropriate stance which the church should take toward modernity is, of course, dependent on how modernity itself is understood, an understanding rendered immeasurably more difficult by the announced arrival of "postmodernity...
...But there are other stories, voiced by people of equally deep faith and love for the church but with quite different experiences, and I would like them to be heard as well...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...Until the critics of Humanae vitae address this, John Paul II will continue to win the philosophical argument while much of the population simply ignores him...
...Maybe I will...
...Thus it cannot be satisfied by partial accommodations but ultimately demands from Christianity a complete surrender...
...Is abortion progressive and humane or retrograde and violent...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...I think of Jan Korski skiing across the Alps, a consecrated host in a pendant on a chain around his neck, to tell the Allies who couldn't have cared less what was happening at Auschwitz...
...This conciliar outlook manifests itself in numerous particular ways—the dismissal of atheism as "foolhardiness," the condemnation of abortion as an "unspeakable crime," the reference to the "plague of divorce...
...Liberal religion treats the secular culture as possessing a superior wisdom and restricts religious beliefs to what the culture allows, including endorsing every movement deemed to be "progressive" (Marxism, feminism, the sexual revolution, environmentalism...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...Thus the church stands ready to provide that which alone would allow modernity to achieve its fulfillment...
...Their replies follow...
...Every dialogue has a senior partner, and the possibility of the church's reaching some kind of rapprochement with modernity depends on who that senior partner is...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...Some of these elements were embraced, or at least tolerated, by the church from the beginning...
...Matthew Kowalski makes the point that allowing artificial birth control would lead inevitably to abortion, since for people whose sexual activity already excludes the thought of having a child, "abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Alleva's rapture It is irenic of Richard Alleva ["Beam Me Up," January 12] to seek no quarrel with the idea of the Rapture or even with the LaHaye-Jenkins interpretation of it...
...Unbelievers who undergo conversion are almost always attracted to religion's more traditional forms...
...In the end such liberalism is unable to explain why religious faith has any value at all, since by its criteria the churches manifest merely a long history of reactionary errors...
...Why doesn't the professor provide a consistent ethic of sexual behavior taking into account the experience of married people, homosexuals, and those who are single "yet whose erotic desires find no legitimate or sanctified expression...
...But less commonly recognized is the way in which even the "progressive" elements in Gaudium et spes grow out of what must be called a classical mentality...
...For example, Johnson's focus on the use of the rhetoric of self-control causes him to miss the larger point: many of us who follow church teachings do so joyfully and find that it has brought greater, not lesser, pleasure and happiness to our lives...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...18 The skeptical stance of the church toward modernity apparently institutionalized in the present pontificate has been necessary because, almost as soon as the Second Vatican Council was over, the entire Western world was engulfed in the social and cultural upheaval dubbed "the sixties," during which it was impossible to make measured judgments about change and the church was severely pressured to abandon virtually all of its beliefs...
...Are they competing for legitimacy in our understanding of Catholicism...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...But this very process of accommodation merely confirms modernists in their conviction that they are correct in rejecting belief and in their surmise that believers themselves are gradually recognizing that their faith is incredible...
...Paradoxically, the church can come to terms with what is best in modernity only from a firmly orthodox perspective, in which the church is sure of its status as the senior partner in the dialogue...
...In the fourth century it was "modern" for the church to embrace the Roman Empire...
...In each age, Protestant liberals jettison certain elements of their tradition, once considered essential, now dismissed as merely culturally conditioned and hence as obstacles to belief...
...In other movements—Protestantism, the Enlightenment, Marxism—modernity chose to define itself precisely in opposition to Catholicism, so that it is impossible to see how any kind of rapprochement could have been effected at the time...
...But lacking the gospel of Jesus Christ, all its hopes are doomed to be disappointed...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...What happens when this earthly life is ended...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...It does not succeed in winning over the skeptics but (again illustrated in the history of modern Protestantism) persuades believers that they do not need religion at all...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...REV...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...The phenomenon of the sixties was largely Western, and that too raises an unresolved question about the universal church's appropriate response to modern culture...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...The papacy of John Paul II is seen to have reestablished balance in the church and to have offered an alternative to the easy acceptance of modernity...
...Ironically, while the church is routinely condemned as the perennial enemy of change, in recent times its historical openness to technology has been criticized as the root of Western maltreatment of nature...
...With centuries of hindsight, and with the leisure of academic detachment, it may now seem possible to transcend past hostilities and arrive at common ground...
...Perhaps it's the general intellectual numbness of coming off a hotly contested election with its high polemics, but I find personal reflections by such sensitive narrators more persuasive these days than the closely reasoned certainty of experts...
...Pius DCs "Syllabus of Errors" is, of course, the prime exhibit of the church's allegedly narrow-minded and intransigent reaction to essentially benign currents of modern culture...
...Gaudium et spes comes to terms with modernity in classical ways, by recalling perennial truths about human nature, conscience, moral law, and the need for religious faith...
...If a man were given an assignment to locate conservative Christians swiftly, and if in adjoining rooms there were conventions of engineers and poets in session, he would be well advised to visit the former...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...The Galileo case notwithstanding, the church has never been antiscience, even less antitechnology, and a persuasive case has been made that in some ways Western science was itself made possible by the Christian view of creation and of the fundamental order of the universe...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...The papacy of John Paul II is understood as an interruption and even a disruption in the practice of the dialogue, engagement, and collegiality called for by Vatican II...
...The church has in fact eventually accommodated itself to the genuinely positive strains of modernity, and there is much to be said for its chronic policy of caution...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...The ambiguities of modernity itself are at the heart of the question...
...In point of fact, has the author actually been willing to listen to and learn from people who give witness to the magnificent grace available to those 43 who foEow the church's teachings on sexuality...
...Modernity is defined almost always in terms of the Western history of the past five hundred years, as though those cultures which did not pass through the revolutionary crucibles of the modern West are simply backward and fated to travel the same road belatedly...
...As he suggests, we ought to revisit this encyclical, and we may end up concluding that John Paul II's personalism cannot support his opposition to artificial contraception...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...In due course the censures of the "Syllabus of Errors" were found (at least in the short run) not to be relevant to certain kinds of political liberalism...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...Without anticipating whatever surprises history may have in store, it appears that liberal religion will scarcely even exist as an organized movement a generation from now...
...Without taking up the philosophical issues behind his "deductive theology," I would push Johnson on his concluding claim that "we must, in all humility, be willing to learn from the bodies and the stories of those whose response to God and to God's world involves sexual love...
...Thus the irony whereby liberals now hope that the next pope will be a Western European, possibly even an Italian, while many conservatives would be happy to see an African ascend the throne of Peter...
...What is the meaning of suffering, evil, and death...
...VERSION ONE A continuum in the great tradition James Hitchcock Are rival interpretations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic history vying for our attention and making competing claims to be the true history...
...The papacy itself patronized Renaissance humanism...
...This, it seems to me, would go beyond repetition of the platitudes about access to a lover's body and the benefits of sexual enjoyment to a discussion about the real experiences of people who have made a serious attempt to conform to doctrinal standards...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...The council discovered the basis for hope in the fact that human beings are asking, "What is man...
...Johnson wants church teaching to be based in ordinary life experience, but let him consider this basic problem: If a population of 1 million couples is using artificial birth control, one year the normal failure rate will result in at least fifty thousand unwanted pregnancies...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...5 McGowan, by juxtaposing the general chaos of India's earthquake with the particular and personal moral challenge of a public interrogation, managed, for me at least, to convey how bewildering our world is and how great events find reflections in our everyday life...
...Marvin, S.D...
...In this view, Vatican II was a dramatic turning point in which the church was tested and renewed by its encounter with the modem world...
...The charge of "triumphalism"—the claim to superior wisdom and authority—is often made against precondliar Catholicism, but to the degree that the epithet has validity it must also be applied to Vatican II's supposedly seminal gesture of rapprochement with the modern world—Gaudium et spes...
...But all except a few of the pronouncements in that document are defensible in the light of liberalism as the church then experienced it...
...What is pertinent is a reexamination of the moral issue in light of medical disaster, not a reexamination of the pope's entire corpus to justify the church's present stance...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...Just a small point in response to Popiel: I think that I called the pope's theology "deductive," whereas I would prefer a theology that was more "inductive...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...Liberalism in religion succeeds in making faith more credible to modernists only to the degree that it makes it seem less benighted than before...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...But Christians reading the New Testament as a source of divine revelation may demand more of a proposed exegesis than that it be sincere and interesting...
...The difficulty of defining modernity is already present in the difficulty of deciding exactly when and why it began, with answers ranging from medieval nominalism and Renaissance humanism, through Protestantism, the New Science, and the Enlightenment, to industrial capitalism, democracy, and the artistic avant-garde...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...The author replies: Derek Jeffreys and Roger Landry think that I have misrepresented Pope John Paul II because I did not take into account his other writings on the subject of human love, or grasp the "purpose of a catechetical address...
...Eureka moments I trust that Luke Timothy Johnson is too good a scholar not to be profoundly embarrassed that he failed to read Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility before penning his "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body.'" In this 1960 work, the future pope convincingly establishes the "embodiedness" of his teaching on human sexuality, including a positive discussion on the role of pleasure in the conjugal act, the sheer candor of which was considered by many contemporaries as beneath the dignity of a prelate...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...Part of modernity's unfolding claim for itself, at least since the eighteenth century, has been precisely a kind of temporal and cultural imperialism, the assumption that its ways ought to be binding always and everywhere...
...But if these are the pope's sentiments, why is there no trace of them in the multiple addresses making up Theology of the Body...
...If Pius X painted Catholic modernism with too broad a brush, the modernists themselves were unable, on their own principles, to distinguish authentic from inauthentic new expressions of the faith...
...19 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...But if God is the Lord of history, then he stands in judgment on every age, and modernity cannot, more than any other era, claim for itself a historically privileged position...
...REV...
...The modern world embraces a fervent dream of human well-being...
...Religious liberals of all major faiths have labored, over a century and a half, to forge a viable religion that is both faithful to its most authentic traditions yet also modern...
...But every elementary account of artistic modernism emphasizes the sense of fragmentation, the loss of every certitude, inherent in it, so that to be modern in this sense is necessarily to eschew all religious truth...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...Modern liberal Protestantism has provided a laboratory test of how Christianity might accommodate itself to the forces of modernity...
...The Vatican practice of titling documents by their first few Latin words has helped perpetuate a misunderstanding of the decree, in that "joy and hope" sounds an optimistic note, while the next few words ("grief and anguish") immediately recognize the negative side of modernity...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...Have two versions of post-Vatican II history emerged...
...One of the many ambiguities of modernity is the polarization between its "hard" manifestations— science, technology, and industrial capitalism—and "soft" versions— the radical subjectivism which is expressed in its purest forms by artists...
...Many technologists are very devout in traditional ways, even though their work places them much closer to the heart of a certain kind of modernity than does the vocation of the poet, which has hardly changed over thousands of years...
...Seldom do liberals examine the possibility that modernity itself, in the full sense of the term, is simply antireligious, that rejection of belief is essential to its self-understanding...
...Rudolf Bultmann famously asked how a man who turns on a light bulb and shaves with an electric razor could still believe in miracles, to which the simple answer is that many people do...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...Beginning with the Enlightenment, there have always been Protestants eager to come to terms with Christianity's "cultured despisers," in effect allowing each age's reigning secular orthodoxies to define the acceptable limits of religious belief...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...Doctrinal issues aside, what the solemn definition of papal infallibility achieved, among other things, was a declaration of the church's independence from all secular authority, and a papacy now equipped to fight for that independence in an often hostile social and political environment...
...The best of the Enlightenment has long been incorporated into Catholic thought, in ways far different from the pell-mell surrender negotiated by some eighteenth-century Christians...
...The thought of John Paul II itself provides a major example of this approach, a broad and ambitious attempt to relate the Catholic faith to everything positive in modern culture...
...Despite Pius XII's Humanae generis, orthodox Catholic scholars (including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself) have profitably moved in new theological directions...
...That hardly matters, since the spirit of the times demands it...
...If modernity is understood as merely the sum total of everything that has happened in Western civilization since the High Middle Ages, it risks becoming a meaningless concept...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
