Vatican politics is beginning to look a little like a chess game. White against black. A battle between those who love the Church through the ages against those who want to see her confined to modernity.
The game is of course between tradition and modernity, which is odd because on those occasions when people ask “why become Catholic?” one of the stock answers given is “in order to be healed from a form of ecclesial Alzheimer’s, and reclaim the memory of where the Holy Spirit has guided the Church throughout history”.
Protestants on the other hand suffer from a memory loss that stretches for three quarters of the life-history of the Church. This inevitably leads to a deformed ecclesiology, something that gets healed on becoming a Catholic.
So, it is particularly hard to watch the work of the Dicastery for Divine Worship moving against the Latin Mass in the name of the “pastoral” Second Vatican Council and appearing to attempt to wipe out part of the memory of the Church.
“Why did Cardinal Roche issue the Rescript?” asked an editorial in this magazine a few days ago. Why indeed. It appears to constitute another move on the chess board in the current game of chess that the Vatican is playing with diocesan bishops as part of the assault on memory.
Complexity and simplicity co-exist of course, but there are times when it helps to involve William of Ockham and take a razor to the undergrowth and strip it back to expose the roots.
Whatever the arguments about what the Second Vatican Council intended to achieve, there is a mindset that has come to prominence in the Church that appears to be opposed to all forms of Catholicism pre-dating the Second Vatican Council. It would be understandable if this took the form of an enabling of evangelization and wanted a rich mixed economy. But it looks like something else.
Jordan Peterson perceptively adopts the language of deliverance to describe people who become so committed to an ideology that they can’t compromise or see the other side of the argument. He describes them as no longer having an ideology but being “possessed by the ideas”.
It’s a rather chilling metaphor. And it brings us back to the chess game of black against white, combining in this case aesthetics and metaphysics. Being possessed either metaphorically or by an idea is at best sub-optimal. And it’s worth remembering that there is precedent for this. Judas, one of the apostles chosen by our Lord, had a complex relationship with the dark side.
In our era, however, for some time progressive Catholics have been trying to persuade the rest of the Church that all they were being invited to engage with was helpful evolution, organic growth and legitimate development. But there sometimes comes a moment when circumstances strip away the complexities, exposing things as they really are. It has become more binary.
The two primary areas of complexity and conflict have turned out to be the Latin Mass and Synodality.
Synodality was originally sold to the Church under the guise that walking together with the marginalised was a virtuous expression of Christian spirituality and ethics. But in a sudden exposure reminiscent of that moment in Animal Farm when having notionally pursued equality, the chant “two legs good, four legs bad” breaks out, the egalitarian rhetoric on synodality – in Germany at least – is being exposed as only being a cover to achieve a particular heterodox end.
If we join up the thinking for a moment, we discover that the principles of inclusion and accompaniment driving synodality do not apply to the Latin Mass community.
One might think the habitual attendees of TLM do indeed constitute a small minority in the Church. But it seems that “accompanying the marginalised’ is only acceptable when the marginalised are on the edge of the Church objecting to Catholic teaching, rather than those at the centre of the Church who accept Catholic teaching such as those who choose to attend the TLM. In other words, “not those marginalised- the other marginalised!”
Inclusive accompaniment is only required when the end is intended to be those who believe in ethics and values the Church has rejected in the past. The whole process is to achieve a change in what Catholicism is.
A few days ago, four distinguished German women came to the same conclusion. They removed themselves from the discussions facilitating the German Synodal Way. In terms of “Vatican chess”, they accused the opposition of cheating and withdrew.
A few weeks before the German Synodal Way’s final meeting next month, they announced they were stepping aside from what has become an increasingly controversial process.
Katharina Westerhorstmann and Marianne Schlosser, professors of theology, Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, a philosopher, and the journalist Dorothea Schmidt raised fundamental objections about the direction and the conduct of the German event (as CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner reported on Feb. 22.)
They objected that the organisers of the Synodal Way were “casting doubt on central Catholic doctrines and beliefs”.
They accused the organisers not only of ignoring the Vatican’s repeated warnings and interventions, but of using pressure tactics not commensurate with synodality (or, as they might have added, “accompaniment”.)
Cardinal Roche’s Rescript over the celebration of the Latin Mass has met a similar objection; but in this case from another canon lawyer, Bishop Paprocki of the Springfield Diocese, Ohio.
Bishop Paprocki has decided to respond to canon law with canon law. When Cardinal Roche issued his rescript he was ready with a riposte. We might for the purposes of Vatican chess call this the “American Bishops’ defence”.
Bishop Paprocki had already questioned whether the rescript was consistent with the Holy Father’s original intention in Traditionis custodes. He had noted that Cardinal Roche took the initiative on this clarification rather than the Pope himself.
Bishop Paprocki noted that the Pope’s accompanying letter suggested that his intention had been to empower the bishops. In the letter, the Pope told bishops “it is up to you to authorise … the use of the ‘Missale Romanum’ of 1962” and “it is up to you to … determine case by case the reality of the groups which celebrate with this ‘Missale Romanum.’” Like many bishops across the world, he was disturbed by the claims of a Dicastery in the Vatican that it had a firmer grasp on the pastoral and spiritual needs of his diocese than he did.
“I question the wisdom of [the rescript] under the principle of subsidiarity,” the bishop said. He said subsidiarity suggests these decisions are made “usually at a local level”.
In this case, the American bishop’s defence involved preparing what the Roche rescript would set out to do. Because there had already been rumours that the Vatican would centralise authority in this matter, Paprocki pre-empted the rescript by taking additional action to ensure that Traditionis custodes would not affect any of the Latin Masses within his diocese.
In January 2022, he formally redesignated Sacred Heart in Springfield as a non-parochial church. He was able to do this because the parish, St. Katharine Drexel Parish, already had two churches.
“Just to remove any doubt … I was able to re-designate that church,” Paprocki said. “That took care of Sacred Heart Church.”
Cardinal Roche’s Rescript only applies to the Latin Mass celebrated in a parish. So the obvious answer for bishops who don’t want to surrender their pastoral responsibilities to Cardinal Roche, is to become more creative about what is a parish and what isn’t. Chapels, oratories and presbyteries are not parishes.
The struggle continues. The Vatican chess audience is waiting for the next move.
The Catholic world is waiting to see what the Dicastery for Divine Worship produces; it might get called “the Roche Gambit”.