Fifty years on from Vatican II, Catholics are still
split on what it actually achieved. Desmond Fisher wonders what next for
a Church in crisis.When a Curia Cardinal asked him what he expected the Council to achieve, he is supposed to have thrown open the window of his study and said: "I want to let a bit of fresh air into the Church".
Half a century later, however, whatever is blowing through the Catholic Church now is more of a hurricane than a bit of fresh air. Thousands of Catholics are abandoning their religion. Mass attendance, the criterion for measuring the number of practising Catholics, has dropped to a single percentage figure. The authority of the Church as an institution has been dangerously undermined by the continuing reports of clerical child sex abuse. Secularism, materialism and atheism are spreading exponentially throughout traditional Christian countries in the Western world. With two-thirds of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics in the southern hemisphere, the word is that the Curia, in its longer-term predictions, has written off Europe as a Christian domain.
Some Catholics view these developments as the toxic consequence of Vatican II, as the Council is now colloquially called. They believe the Council gave the green light to an à la carte form of Catholicism, thus shunting the Church onto a track leading eventually to disaster. They are convinced that only a return to the firm certainties and strict centralised control of the pre-Council Church will stop the rot and restore Catholics to what the then Archbishop John Charles McQuaid of Dublin called "the tranquillity of your Christian lives".
Others regard these arguments as nonsense. In their view, the institutional Church was on the wrong track long before Vatican II and if the decisions of the Council had been implemented it might not be in the predicament it is in today.
They believe the Church must adapt so as best to fulfil its traditional mission to humankind. For them, the Council is the junction that can switch it onto the right track for the renewal and reform of an institution that, in its present state, they consider to be no longer fit for purpose.
Caught between these conflicting perceptions of their Church and what should be done about it, Catholics are in a period of indecision that has now lasted for half a century. The majority are probably waiting for a decisive lead for them to follow. The rest are divided into two minority blocs — those for or against Vatican II — that seem irreconcilable.
The failure to decide what to do is understandable. The problem is Catholics are now faced with two conflicting scenarios. One is to hold on to the existing hierarchical structure with its emphasis on absolute Papal authority and a religion marked by devotionalism, passive conformity and unquestioning obedience. In this portrayal, the Church is represented as a pyramid with the Pope on top of successive layers of Cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and religious with the laity underneath them all, its functions, as one bishop said at the Council, seeming to be "to pray, to obey and to pay".
The alternative is the Council’s vision of a more egalitarian organisation in which the Pope is seen as the head of a College of Bishops who, as successors of the Apostles, share with him full and supreme power over the universal church. In such a Church, all its members, cleric and lay, work together in the service of the whole community. It would be portrayed as a circle, a communion of people on equal terms but with different functions, each serving the People of God on a pilgrimage through history to change the world into what God wants it to be. Pyramid or circle? Hierarchy or communion? It requires a leap of faith to change from one to the other. That is not ever likely to be the institutional Church’s way of acting. The Curia’s motto is said to be Qui pensiamo in seculi (Here we think in terms of centuries). In other words, the Vatican reacts rather than acts.
As its reaction to Vatican II has shown, it has done nothing to implement some of the Council’s main decisions in the expectation that the pressure for action will diminish and disappear with time. Examples are the vision of the Church as the People of God, the collegiality of the Bishops, the invitation to the other Christian Churches to join in a search for unity. The inevitable loss of adherents this inaction is creating seems to be regarded as an acceptable price to pay for protecting Mother Church from dangerous disturbance of the status quo. And if it is ever forced to act, as it has been on some of the Council’s decrees, the ‘do nothing’ policy is bolstered by an outward show of progress disguising a ‘one step forward, two steps back’ agenda, as with the vernacular liturgy and the incapacitated Synod of Bishops.
The result has been that John XXIII’s great vision of a new Pentecost is still as far from realisation as it was on the morning of Oct 11, 1962, when he officially opened the Council with the stirring proclamation Gaudet Mater Ecclesia (Rejoice Mother Church). The future of the Roman Catholic Church is now unpredictable. One scenario is of a docile, passive, subservient laity, tranquillised by unquestioning devotion and ruled by a remote, elitist clerical upper class. The other is of an informed laity, performing its God-given role as a partner in the fellowship that is continuing Christ’s salvific mission on earth.
There are some signs that lay people in various parts of the world are beginning to realise the significance of the tension between these two perceptions of the nature and function of the Catholic Church. New associations of priests who are demanding major changes are well-established in Ireland and Austria. In Ireland too, once an exemplar of unquestioning obedience to Rome, a new association of Catholic men and women is demanding changes. In the United States, where 15% of Catholics are said to have left the Church in recent years, heavy-footed Curial intimidation of a nuns’ central organisation has intensified an already precarious situation.
The question now is why and when will the mass of Catholics, who are waiting on the sideline for leadership, accept that they have a right and a duty to take sides. The Curia, trusting in the apparently definitive changes introduced by the 16th century Council of Trent, buttressed by the 19th century Vatican I’s definition of Papal infallibility, will try to stick to its guns.
Ordinary Catholics, like Chesterton’s people of England, "have not spoken yet". Another half century of neglect or inertia in implementing Vatican II’s radical decisions seems certain to end up in one of two ways. Either it will result in halving the present membership of the Roman Catholic Church, or in another full-blown schism. Either way, the stakes are high. The longer the delay, the worse the outcome.
* Desmond Fisher covered the Second Vatican Council for the Catholic Herald UK, of which he was editor from 1962 to 1966.