INTERPRETING VATICAN II
O'Malley, John W.
VERSION TWO A break from the past John W. O'Malley teach a course titled "Two Great Councils: Trent and Vatican II." In it I pit the two councils against one another because I believe, with...
...Maybe this was a passing rapture, or maybe, especially given the extraordinary length of its documents, the council intended to change things more radically than simply turning the priest around at Mass to face the people, even more radically than did Trent...
...Vatican II was a doctrinal council...
...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...
...Yet on a deeper level we know well that content and mode of expression are inextricably intertwined, that there is no thought without expression, and expression is what style is all about...
...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...
...This time the cliche got it right: The medium is the message...
...The style of this nouvelle theologie, to use Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange's contemptuous designation for what de Lubac represented, was perhaps even more at issue than doctrines when that theology was being held suspect and subversive before the council...
...Freedom of speech" was a value of the modern world, open to abuses, of course, but nonetheless based on a respect for conscience and the dignity of each person's convictions...
...19 (Continued from page 17) heartfelt acceptance...
...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...
...John Paul II is not only aware of the issue but has himself called for its examination in his 1995 encyclical Ut unum sint...
...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...
...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...
...They were meant to effect closure...
...Godfrey's opening sentences prepared me for a sentimental look at his ordeals as a single parent...
...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...
...By resurrecting an outmoded ethical category, Johnson does little to further the debate about Humane vitae...
...Instead he offered a gentle argument for the large family, that carried all the more weight for avoiding the hectoring arguments of church apologists...
...What was the change Vatican II wanted to effect, and can it be put in a word or two...
...Modern liberal Protestantism has provided a laboratory test of how Christianity might accommodate itself to the forces of modernity...
...Jeffreys says that the pope does not really have an "act-centered morality...
...Unbelievers who undergo conversion are almost always attracted to religion's more traditional forms...
...Readings of Scripture that force it into a fortune-telling role do not have a good track record...
...The church could teach seated around the table in the seminar room as well as by thundering truths to passive ears from the heights of the lecturer's podium...
...But lacking the gospel of Jesus Christ, all its hopes are doomed to be disappointed...
...But it is also a claim of senior partnership on the part of the church...
...The style—"mere style"— was the threat...
...He is more in a position to address these issues than the pope...
...questions which modernity itself has found it impossible to answer and which postmodernity has declared inherently meaningless...
...In its reform decrees it did the same thing analogously by prescribing certain behavior, especially for bishops and priests, and by threatening punishment for failure to comply: Make Them Behave...
...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...
...But "spirit" is a vague term, incapable of providing firm guidelines for interpretation...
...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...
...It spoke in a new way...
...DEREK s. JEFFREYS Green Bay, Wis...
...In the same decade a wider upheaval erupted around the world, most notably among students, attacking authority and law enforcement of every kind...
...They did not know how to function in this new mode and sometimes even wondered if they were to function at all...
...It is worlds apart from Trent...
...A new papacy and a new papal style had come into being that emphasized, almost to the point of caricature, the authoritarian strains in the Catholic tradition and that set the church against and above every person and idea outside it...
...Although both were extraordinarily verbose—that is, both had a lot to say— they were verbose in different ways...
...We can take the phrase "spirit of the council" to mean that the documents of the council have a reality and meaning that transcend a narrow reading of the texts which, in proof-texting fashion, fishes out sentences to accommodate a minimal interpretation...
...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...
...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...
...At stake in the debates over the interpretation of Vatican II is the style of the church...
...For whatever reasons, the fundamental teaching of Vatican II—its teaching about style, its teaching about how the church is to conduct itself—has in practice either been eroded or never been implemented...
...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...
...Style is not manners or ornament but the expression of deepest personality...
...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...
...This is borne out by documented facts: a high percentage of women seeking abortions were using birth control methods that failed...
...I rather doubt that this generation's revisionists would have either...
...It sometimes began to seem that papal authority was no longer just the ultimate authority in the church but the only authority...
...I have no more objection to those who choose this path than I do to those who choose celibacy, in or out of marriage...
...In the Alberigo/Tanner collection of the documents from the twenty-one councils recognized as ecumenical by the Catholic church, two councils—Trent and Vatican II—take up about one-third of the space...
...The council hit the church like a great meteor from outer space...
...Godfrey's "Crowd Control" reimpressed on me how disparate elements can join to strike a blow to the solar plexus...
...marian burkhart New York, N.Y...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...If so, what precisely was the change...
...Well, if he does not, then his persistence in supporting Humanae vitae becomes even stranger, for that composition is strictly act-centered...
...It taught about the church...
...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...
...REV...
...What is the significance of this "new" style...
...That's what I am...
...The decree on revelation, moreover, underscored the mystery of our encounter with the divine and hence the inadequacy of all our confessional statements about it...
...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...
...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...
...This was respectful listening to the other...
...Its style sets Vatican II off from every previous council...
...Dialogue, collegiality, ecumenism, and positive engagement with "the modern world" began to take concrete form...
...Dialogue tried to open the church to it...
...They did so in response to the belief that Christ died to save all of us— Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and the handicapped as well...
...Rather than maintain the siege style that rejected everything in the modem world, the council wanted to open the church to what was valid and helpful in it, much of which was a retrieval of its own deepest traditions...
...For a decade or so, the meteor seemed to wreak havoc...
...Moreover, I have witnessed too many joy-filled "Eureka...
...What it tries to indicate is altogether valid, but the word is too soft to do the reality justice...
...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...
...It was a style based on rhetoric understood as the art of persuasion, the art of finding common ground that will enable previously disagreeing parties to join in action for a common cause...
...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...
...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...
...It exists to ease its adherents' way into secular modernity...
...The formulation of Lumen gentium was surely influenced by the patristic revival led by Henri de Lubac and others, which used as a resource not only many patristic motifs regarding the church but also the fathers' style of discourse...
...My experiences lead me to believe that the answer would not be as dismal as the author assumes...
...Thus the church stands ready to provide that which alone would allow modernity to achieve its fulfillment...
...The Petrine ministry is not only the most important in the church, it sets the pattern for how bishops deal with their priests, how priests deal with their flocks, and how Catholics deal with one another and with everyone else...
...To accomplish the goals of the council, the documents appeal to the good will of those to whom they are directed and therefore strive to motivate them to (Continued on page 20) 17 (Continued from page 16) secular encroachments on their liberties...
...Is it compassionate, fair in its procedures, eager to hear both sides of controversial issues, open to the future, respectful of each person's truth...
...It is precisely the connection between birth control and abortion that Johnson seems to disregard...
...Despite Pius XII's Humanae generis, orthodox Catholic scholars (including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger himself) have profitably moved in new theological directions...
...Without style, no Michelangelo...
...Immediate implementation was the battle cry, but it was a battle cry without a battle plan...
...Does it rely on special oaths, intimidation, and double talk to secure acquiescence to doctrines and decisions...
...I have no reason to think I would have had such courage...
...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...
...It answered it by the overall style of its language as well as by specific vocabulary that reflected and made explicit what the style implied...
...Thus also the council's best known rapprochement with modernity—Dignitatis humanae—rests upon a classical understanding of human freedom and dignity...
...Is it suspicious and secretive, even in its dealings with its own members...
...A radical change had been called for...
...How is the church...
...While exhortation and exposition were surely not absent from Trent, its more significant documents were framed in prescriptive language...
...It indicates true collaboration between bishops and their priests, among bishops, of bishops with the pope—collaboration, not just consultation...
...As in the Chinese curse, the times were interesting...
...His thinking leads to a very confusing ethical point of view...
...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...
...Within the United States, the episcopal con21 ference seemed to exemplify beautifully how these realities could come together in a new ecclesial style that was genuinely collaborative without entailing an abdication of responsibility...
...It called for conversion from an old style of being church to a new style...
...When a "modern" artist becomes a believer he ceases to be modern in the true sense...
...The council is about style...
...Vatican II made front-page news for four years, arousing in people from almost every walk of life and every religious background astonishment, delight, despair, and incredulity...
...My "how" better expresses who I am than my "what...
...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...
...LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON Large families & ideas I was pleasantly surprised by two pieces in the February 9 issue of Commonweal...
...Thus it cannot be satisfied by partial accommodations but ultimately demands from Christianity a complete surrender...
...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...
...The documents of Trent, then, have a closed, top-down, and prescriptive style, which by and large is the style employed by every other ecumenical council—except Vatican II...
...What was the style that needed changing, and from where did it spring...
...Collegiality, as Orsy points out, has become an empty word...
...Its language, while theologically correct, tends to be (or at least often sounds) nontechnical...
...It legislated little, and, even when it did, it did not prescribe punishment for offenders...
...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...
...Yet upon first glance—and, I think, upon last glance—the way the council put things is its most obvious, striking feature...
...The ambiguities of modernity itself are at the heart of the question...
...I hope thus to establish a framework for assessing the significance of Vatican II for the church today...
...Within the church itself, electronic communications of various kinds helped the papacy assume an importance and all-encompassing authority unknown in previous ages...
...Why can't the consensual use of a condom be as holy an act as the consensual avoidance of fertility...
...Dialogue assumed a certain specificity with "ecumenism...
...Although I could provide a long list, I will here limit myself to one of each...
...All is not well...
...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...
...Old ways don't die easily...
...Landry praises what the pope had said about pleasure and the rest in 1960...
...The documents read more like invitations than injunctions...
...Lumen gentium, the doctrinal centerpiece of Vatican II, provided the stylistic model for subsequent church documents...
...Gaudium et spes is accommodating to modernity mainly because it refrains from mere condemnation and offers instead a hand of friendship...
...for most of the bishops who attended the council...
...As never before, we had come to live in a papal church...
...Since these couples have already decided to separate childbearing from sexual pleasure, abortion becomes the natural solution...
...Jo McGowan's "Corporal Punishment" and A.W...
...This takes us to an even deeper level...
...That should not obscure for us the profound implications of the term...
...Can it be put in a word or two...
...How could it have been otherwise...
...Robert hannon Fairbanks, Ark...
...Nobody loves me for my what...
...Trent "defined" certain doctrines, which means it closed discussion...
...By the mid-seventies moderate voices within the church had begun to prevail...
...The problem we've had in interpreting Vatican II stems in large measure from our obsession with trying to figure out what the council said without taking due account of how the council said it...
...JULIAN IRIAS Davis, Calif...
...Although the documents of Vatican II themselves give little evidence of it, we know from other sources that a change in the style as to how the Holy See itself functioned was a special desideratum...
...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...
...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...
...It taught about the church through ideas like collegiality and dialogue and by its style, which correlated with such ideas...
...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...
...Marvin, S.D...
...Well, it was new for a council, but otherwise it replicates, to a remarkable degree, the style the fathers of the church used in their sermons, treatises, and commentaries down to Saint Bernard in the twelfth century, before the advent of Scholasticism...
...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...
...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...
...It was a change in this closed, ghetto-like, authoritarian style that the council wanted to effect...
...moments among young engaged and married couples not to be convinced of the Theology of the Body's great pastoral utility...
...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...
...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...
...In it I pit the two councils against one another because I believe, with Aristotle, that it's basically through the discernment of likenesses and differences that we learn...
...God will hear you...
...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...
...The style of Vatican II is different: this is the clue indicating the significance of the council...
...Maybe I will...
...It was rooted in the respect for conscience and trust in its truths that the council expressed with such force...
...I would not be surprised to find them multiplied...
...The council discovered the basis for hope in the fact that human beings are asking, "What is man...
...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...
...It did not, for instance, want to turn the church into a democracy, as its almost obsessively repeated affirmations of papal authority demonstrate...
...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...
...But that enterprise has proved chimerical...
...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...
...Pius XII, in a Christmas message toward the end of World War II, for instance, put in the first good word for "democracy" ever to come from the Holy See...
...That was the big question Vatican II addressed and answered...
...This simple bit of information suggests to me as a historian that the documents are trying to say something more than business as usual...
...The Holy Office of the Inquisition functioned with a vigor it had not known since it was instituted in the sixteenth century...
...For me thaf s the challenge of the council and its deepest, pressingly pertinent significance...
...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...
...I'm still looking for answers...
...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...
...The new style is profoundly significant and, in my opinion, goes to the heart of the council...
...As the evils of democracy spread, the papacy began to function in ever more autocratic fashion, even in dealing with bishops...
...I wonder how this squares with the experience of believers...
...If I'm loved, I'm loved for my how...
...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...
...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...
...As is always said of it, it defined nothing...
...The joys of Catholic sex Luke Timothy Johnson's article left me with a nagging unease...
...Vatican II did not want the church to abdicate its role as teacher of the gospel, but it insisted the church, like all good teachers, needed to learn as it taught...
...Questions about the style with which such papal authority is exercised should not, therefore, come as a surprise...
...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...
...Before trying to answer those questions, let me point out a difference between Trent and Vatican II...
...Is closure on every issue to be secured from on high at the earliest possible moment, with no possibility of revision in the light of further discussion...
...But was it new...
...Michelangelo painted traditional subjects, but it is his style that makes them memorable...
...Bishops who participated spoke of "the end of the CounterReformation," even more boldly of "the end of the Constantinian era," and more boldly still of "a new Pentecost...
...PAUL A. HOTTINGER Downers Grove, III...
...Holders of ecclesiastical offices were especially hard hit...
...Or does it make its own decisions without considering whether the "separated brethren" and others like them may have something to contribute...
...Conversion is hard, but the council was certainly clear about what the conversion would look like...
...And we still love our partners and rejoice in our ability to demonstrate that physically...
...Certainly, not everyone who uses natural family planning will find it easy...
...Spirit of the council" means no aspect of the council can be understood without taking a broader reality and meaning into account...
...For the first time in history official ecclesiastical documents promoted respectful listening as the preferred mode of proceeding, as a new ecclesiastical "way...
...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...
...Historians agree that Trent is one of the most significant councils in the history of the church and, indeed, initiated what is often called "the Tridentine era" of Catholicism that lasted for a long, long time...
...JENNIFER POP1EL Green Bay, Wis...
...As couples, we communicate more, not less...
...I wonder what the mystics would say about this...
...May it not be precisely because the "purpose of a catemodern sexual ethics...
...This to me is the real problem of native...
...Still, an ecclesiastical style, not altogether dissimilar in certain particulars to the style of modem totalitarian states, prevailed...
...What happened...
...Not only has centralization of decision making accelerated at a breathtaking pace, but the Vatican's style often seems more autocratic, less dialogical, and less collegial than ever...
...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...
...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...
...This is true enough, but I wonder if Johnson has really offered an alter44 chetical address" was to support, as I suggest, Humanae vitae...
...22 (Continued from page 4} personhood undermines the utilitarian reasoning pervasive in debates about artificial contraception...
...It was not, in the first instance, the art of winning an argument and proving your enemy wrong...
...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...
...We are more in tune with one another's desires...
...The term "dialogue" recurs incessantly in the documents of the council...
...ROGER J. LANDRY Fall River, Mass...
...The dock cannot be turned back so as to ignore the advantages of a strong Petrine ministry, but the question recurs as to just how that ministry is to be exercised...
...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...
...The respectful listening necessarily implied a readiness to change in the light 20 of what the dialogue might reveal...
...Nevertheless, before drawing such a conclusion, we ought to at least represent the pope's position fairly...
...It implied the church as learner as well as teacher...
...Does it look for common ground with people of good will in order to create an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The papacy entered into a new phase in world affairs, assuming a leadership that, with the aid of the modern media, it had never before enjoyed...
...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...
...REV...
...The documents of Vatican II are twice as long as Trent's...
...They were produced by an apparatus of bishops and theologians incomparably more elaborate and sophisticated than those that produced Trent's documentation, and they venture into areas never before touched upon by any council...
...But my point about genocide was linked to the absolute prohibition of condoms, including for people with aids...
...After the council, the word was so shamelessly invoked as the panacea for all problems that one became pained on hearing it...
...In 1968 the encyclical Humanae vitae created even more confusion, partly because of what it taught, partly because of how Paul VI made the decision...
...In December 1998, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a document along similar lines titled "Reflections on the Primacy of Peter...
...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...
...I am pleased to hear them...
...Even today it sounds "so seventyish...
...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...
...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...
...What is the meaning of suffering, evil, and death...
...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...
...As "modernity" in the nineteenth century assumed an evermore ideological definition, the church, especially in the person of Pius IX, rejected it with ever greater intransigence...
...Style" might at first glance seem to labor under the same, or worse, disabilities, for we tend to think of style as ornamentation, "mere rhetoric...
...Is abortion progressive and humane or retrograde and violent...
...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...
...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...
...The movement included people like Alfred Loisy, whose beliefs could hardly have been reconciled with Catholicism under any circumstances...
...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...
...But it did want to redefine how that authority (and all authority in the church) was to function, namely, with a respect for conscience that transformed church members, especially the laity, from "subjects" to participants...
...The modern world embraces a fervent dream of human well-being...
...Between Trent and Vatican II there are many likenesses, many differences...
...It seemed a style consonant with the council's insistence on the respect due to every human being's conscience and opinion...
...Lip service is paid to Vatican II, but an almost systematic deconstruction of the great aims of the council sometimes seems afoot even in the Roman curia...
...The change was a change in style, and, yes, I have put it in a word...
...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...
...It was a top-down style which ignored the horizontal traditions of Catholicism that had made the patristic and medieval church such a vibrant and creative reality...
...With the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, a strong hand took the helm...
...Liberty, equality, and fraternity" had overthrown the God-given order of society, and thus the revolution and the philosophies that underlay it had no redeeming qualities...
...Is Johnson sure that "absolutely everything we can learn about God must come to us" from our bodies...
...Against them the church could assume only an uncompromising stance...
...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...
...Liberalism in religion succeeds in making faith more credible to modernists only to the degree that it makes it seem less benighted than before...
...In the end, some might well agree with Johnson...
...But it's my style that makes me real—loving and genuine, or cunning and contrived...
...I believe this similarity is not accidental...
...This is not to say all was well...
...MATTHEW KOWALSKI, O.S.B...
...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...
...This term rests on a venerable theological and canonical heritage, but a heritage that had been consigned almost to oblivion...
...That hardly matters, since the spirit of the times demands it...
...When "modern ideas" seemed to creep even into Catholic circles, the papacy, most notably under Pius X, pursued a policy of internal surveillance, punishment, and retaliation unprecedented in its effectiveness...
...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...
...The two councils are alike in that they are extremely wordy...
...The council's statements on freedom of conscience were desperately needed to redress the balance...
...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...
...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...
...I am a Jesuit, a historian, an American...
...To that extent it was an acceptance of a truly bad aspect of modernity...
...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...
...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...
...In what way is God's image connected to the human body...
...Respect for conscience, with its deep roots in the Catholic tradition, got badly sidelined, even as it was being emphasized by nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers in the secular and Protestant traditions...
...How do we want the church to be— how in its procedures as well as in the hopes and fears and loves of all its members, as these are expressed individually and collectively...
...Are those healing, eminently Christian, words, "I'm sorry," reserved only for mistakes committed in the distant past and never to be addressed to living persons...
...The style was "modern" in that it crystalized in the nineteenth century as the Catholic reaction to the French Revolution...
...But why should we assume that using a condom is different than periodic abstinence with respect to intention concerning childbirth...
...It indicates a significant break with the long-standing and then-current style of ecclesiastical dealing...
...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...
...The institutional correlate of dialogue was "collegiality...
...Benedict XV, Pius XI, and Pius XII tempered these policies and attitudes...
...What happens when this earthly life is ended...
...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...
...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...
...For more than thirty-five years, we have been debating the meaning of Vatican II, especially in the face of interpretations that tend to minimize its import by contradicting what others see as "the spirit of the council...
...For an analysis of the problem I refer the reader to Archbishop John Quinn's The Reform of the Papacy (Crossroad), and to two excellent articles in America—Hermann J. Pottmeyer's "Primacy in Communion" (June 3-10, 2000) and Ladislas Orsy's "The Papacy for an Ecumenical Age" (October 21, 2000...
...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...
...Is it ever...
...If I enter the pearly gates, it will be because of my how, not because of my what...
Vol. 128 • March 2001 • No. 5
