Others - and their number
is becoming more numerous - will now concede that certain Council
texts are problematic, to say the least, and may have to be revised.
Rumour has it, for instance, that his Eminence Cardinal Stickler considers
a revision of Dignitatis Humanae, the Decree on Religious Liberty,
essential. Which would appear to corroborate the view, long held
by many, that parts of this document appear at least to be at variance
with previous Church teaching.
Gaudium et spes,
the lengthy Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,
though doubtless containing many beautiful passages, descends in other
places, surely, to a banality reminiscent of A.E. Houseman's spoof
on a Greek Chorus.
And then there is the
strange statement in Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution
on the Church (apparently suggested by one of the Protestant observers!)
about the Church of Christ "subsisting" in the Catholic
Church, thereby suggesting something less than a complete identification
between the two.
And yet perhaps even
the odder bits of the Council's documents may admit of an orthodox
interpretation; theologians including Father Brian Harrison, whilst
allowing that Dignitatus Humanae in no way confirms the teaching
of Quanta Cura [1864], have argued that the document is not
quite the blatant contradiction of the former that it at first appears.
And as for the statement in Lumen Gentium about the Church,
well no doubt an orthodox spin can be put on this also, once one realises
that if the word "Catholic" admits more than one meaning
- i.e. one baptised in the Catholic Church or one professing all the
truths of the Catholic faith - then presumably "Catholic Church"
must partake of the same ambivalence. And after all, it was St. Augustine
who said, very many centuries ago, that there were many who appeared
to be inside the Church who are outside and many apparently outside
who were within it.
Integrism
The more I think about
it the more I become convinced that neither in 'publice' nor
in 'subsistet' does the problem lie. In other words, the problem
goes deeper than the Council's texts, most of which, given a bit of
luck and a following wind, can probably be given an orthodox spin.
No, we might get around the odd sentences; but how on earth can we
possibly get around the infinitely odder silences; the silence about
the plague of contraception which was already resulting in large segments
of the faithful in Europe and North America birth-controlling themselves
out of existence; the silence on the pre-eminent place to be awarded
to St. Thomas and the dangers of attempting to express the truths
of the Faith in terms of philosophies radically false.
What do they amount to,
these alarming silences? I am going to stick my neck out here and
say that they amount to a repudiation - not explicit but implicit
- of integrism,(1)
that view according to which certain ways of thought, such as Thomistic
philosophy and political positions generally designated as 'Right
Wing' could not, in practice, be jettisoned without great harm to
the faith.
Maybe it is opportune
here to break off to say a few words about 'integrism,' and here we
encounter a difficulty, since what one says will clearly depend on
whether one is an integrist or an anti-integrist.
The latter will say that
integrists are Catholics who believe that certain long-standing theological
opinions in the Church should be regarded as binding Catholic doctrine,
whilst the integrists themselves will probably say that they were
Catholics in the sense that the word has always been traditionally
understood. Readers of this article will not be surprised to learn
that such is my view and my history of the term would go something
like this:
In the nineteenth
century some Catholics started arguing that many of the ideas
inspiring the French Revolution (notwithstanding copious evidence
of the Masonic inspiration of this event) could be reconciled
with Catholic thought as they were eventually Christian in origin
(sound familiar?). These men, who came to be called 'Liberal
Catholics' had to endure hearing many rude things said about them
by other Catholics (like the Pope, for instance). They did not
like this and, after much thought, came up with a rather clever
wheeze: they thought of a new word 'integrist'. Meant of course
as a term of abuse with which to denigrate their opponents (i.e.
orthodox logical Catholics), and thereby created, with one masterful
stroke of the pen, a climate of opinion in which they - the
Liberals - would appear to be mainstream Catholics and their opponents
a mere extremist sect within the Church. Crude though this manoeuvre
may appear, it succeeded, probably beyond their wildest dreams,
to a point where less than a century later we even find excellent
orthodox Catholics such as Dietrich Von Hildebrand (described
by Pius XII as a twentieth century Doctor of the Church) referring,
incredibly, to the "regrettable narrowness of the integrists."
In fairness to von Hildebrand,
who is one of my own favourite authors and surely ranks among the
greatest lay Defenders of the Faith in the last half-century, along
with Romano Amerio, Correia de Oliveira, Walter Matt, Michael Davies
and a host of others, it should be pointed out that he died a quarter
of a century ago, at a time, in other words, when we thought we had
already hit rock-bottom but were about to discover just how wrong
we were; the delights of Assisi, the Balamand Declaration et. al.,
were yet to come. Bearing in mind the development in his thinking
that had already taken place between 1965, when he wrote Trojan
Horse in the City of God (at which point his position, roughly,
was "the Council's alright it's just been misinterpreted")
and 1977 (when he admitted in correspondence with Michael Davies that
he could now see potential problems in certain Council texts) I personally
consider that had he lived longer he might well have ended up drawing
closer to integrism himself, as indeed have so many others. It remains
true, however, that he was, according to Carol Robinson, author of
My Life with Thomas Aquinas, a member of the "thank God
I'm not a Thomist" school, which in the writer's opinion may
have contributed to his seeing certain issues less clearly than he
may otherwise have done(2).
Anti-Integrist spirit
In any event, the sixty-four
thousand dollar question in all of this is why the pre-conciliar Popes,
all of whom could be described as being broadly of the integrist persuasion
(even if some of their policies have admitted to a certain confusion!(3))
routinely appointed so many non-integrists as Bishops? That this is
so the course of the Council surely bears out. In fact, this ambivalence
in Papal policy goes back much further than the reign of Pope Pius
XII, whose appointees presumably most of the Council Fathers were.
When Father Sada y Salvany brought out his excellent little book Liberalism
is a Sin, the Bishop of Barcelona bent over backwards in his attempts
to get the book put on the Index. While one hundred and fifty years
ago, Monsignor Dupanloup was beavering away doing his best to whittle
down the significance of the Syllabus.
Part of the answer no
doubt is to be found in the Papal policy initiated by the 1801 Napoleonic
Concordat(4)
whereby Bishops were routinely appointed who were considered more
rather than less acceptable to the explicitly or implicitly anti-Catholic
governments among which the Church found herself in the post French
Revolution era(5).
It is a policy
that begins harmlessly enough with the English Church getting Manning
- himself no slouch in doctrine or morals - rather than Ullathorne,
then one hundred years later the Irish getting Eamon Casey(6)
rather than the soutaine-wearing, Latin Mass-saying Monsignor Cremins.
Parvus error in principio - magnus in fine, as St. Thomas would
say. [The error that initially has small consequences will have more
serious consequences subsequently.]
But perhaps another part
of the explanation is that the pre-conciliar Popes, being decent men
and conscious of the necessity of not just being but appearing to
be just, and also being to some degree influenced, perhaps subconsciously,
by the Liberal propaganda outlined above, felt unable to impose upon
the whole Church a point of view that so many argued could not be
"officially identified with orthodoxy", as one modern Catholic
theologian has put it.
But all that is to digress.
Whatever the reason for the mixed signals given by the Vatican in
the first half of the twentieth century with regard to the issue of
integrism, it is surely clear that the refusal of the Council to issue
the unequivocal condemnation of Socialism and Communism which a significant
minority of the Fathers actually requested, together with its failure
to issue the ringing endorsement of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas
that Popes earlier in the century would undoubtedly have held to be
a sine qua non for any fruitful renewal of the Church(7)
- these silences (silences one might say thundering to the heavens)
surely constituted the most eloquent (one might add contemptuous)
rejection of the integrist point of view. It is perhaps for this reason
that we have heard so much of the "spirit of Vatican II."
There is indeed such a spirit, the anti-integrist spirit, and it is
this spirit, going by appearances, which has proved the one indispensable
qualification for hierarchical preferment in the past forty years
- with results upon which one need hardly elaborate.
Postconcilar unravelling
Now, it occurred to me
a little while ago, that wherever there is a dispute over whether
'x' is an integral part of 'y', as opposed to being an accretion,
there is always a simple enough way of getting at the truth; just
try to remove 'x' and see what happens. For example, if I am convinced
that a thread on the front of your jumper is not part of your jumper,
then I am free to test the theory by tugging at the thread; if the
jumper remains intact the thread was indeed an accretion, but if
the jumper unravels, we know the thread was indeed integral to it.
But this is what has
happened, is it not? In the case at hand; a Council which purported
to yank the Church roughly free from beliefs and attitudes which it
deemed to be non-integral to the Faith has been followed - on the
candid admission of non-traditionalist Catholics - by a virtually
total unravelling of the Church's structures unparalleled in her history.
Res Ipsa Loquitur – "the thing speaks for itself"
- as we lawyers are wont to say.
In the fourteenth century,
no doubt pious Catholics, natives of Avignon, could be found to argue
the rightness of the Papal Courts remaining in their town. The view
that the Pope should return to Rome forthwith was "never officially
identified with orthodoxy", but that this was nonetheless the
correct view, the subsequent tragic chain of events was to show. In
like manner, surely, the Council and its tragic aftermath have made
it plain for all with eyes to see, whether the Liberals or the integrists
had the clearer vision. Perhaps, seen in this light, the Council was
indeed a 'gift from the Holy Spirit' if God used it to show us exactly
where a century-and-a-half of tiny, apparently insignificant compromises
had been leading us. For although it can hardly be doubted that we
would not be in the mess we are in today but for the Council, it is,
in my view, equally certain that we would have ended up here one day,
so long as senior church men were inclined to follow in the path of
the seventh, rather than the tenth, Pius(8).
Hatred of error
For the so-called 'integrists'
were right, were they not?(9)Their
Liberal opponents totally wrong, which makes the implicit condemnation
of the integrists by that 'International Bishops' Conference' commonly
referred to as 'Vatican II' so appallingly tragic. So far from being
a narrow sub-sect of Catholics they were actually those who, like
the 'Athanasian Party' in fourth-century Alexandria, actually alone
among so-called 'Catholics' have held onto the traditional faith in
all its purity, uncontaminated by false doctrine. For they were those
who saw that being orthodox entailed not just assenting to defined
doctrines, but also repudiating all those beliefs and assumptions
with which those doctrines could not be reconciled. They saw, in other
words, the need for that hatred of error which is inseparable from
love of truth. Some words of the lay theologian Ernest Hello are apposite
here:
"He who loves
truth detests error... this detestation of error is the touchstone
with which the love for truth is recognised... He who once loved
the truth and later on no longer loves it, does not immediately
declare his defection, but begins by detesting the error less
than before, and thus he deceives himself. The secret acquiescence's
of man constitute one of the most unknown aspects of the history
of the world. When one no longer has a love for the doctrine which
he once professed, usually he retains the symbol of that doctrine;
however, all aversion of the contrary doctrine dies in him."
If the integrists were
negative, it was because there was so much to be negative about; if
there was so much to be negative about, perhaps it was because there
was, in the words of G.K.Chesterton, "a multitude of angles at
which one falls". Truly, to paraphrase the words of the late
Lord Denning, the categories of error, like those of negligence, are
never closed.
How often was it said
that the intregrists were narrow; how blindingly obvious, with the
benefit of hindsight, should the immediate response have been: maybe,
but so is the truth, so is orthodoxy, so - according to good authority
- is the path that leads to Life.
FOOTNOTES:
(1)
The opponents of integrism like
to extend this term to include a liturgical rigorism that would, for
instance, insist upon the minutest of liturgical minutiae. Needless
to say, this is not the sense in which the term 'integrism' is being
used in this article.
(2)
Such
as the Sillon and Mark Sagnier's 'submission' to Pius X.
(3)
For
example, Pius XI, the author of perhaps some of the Church's greatest
encyclicals, who claimed that no true Catholic could be a Socialist
and called Catholics to be "radicals of the right", nevertheless
went on to ban Catholics from joining the right wing political movement
Action Francaise while taking no steps whatsoever, at least
as far as I am aware, to forbid them joining the various socialist
parties already existing at that time.
(4)The
biggest blunder in the Church's history, in Pius X's opinion, according
to Cardinal Ferrata's memoires
(5)
It
may be objected here, with some justice, that there was nothing inherently
new in Kings and Princes having too large a say in the appointment
of Bishops. But of course there is a difference between a situation
where Bishops are chosen by a Catholic - albeit a bad Catholic - and
one where they are chosen by a government inspired by a philosophy
fundamentally antithetic to the Faith.
(6)Obliged
to resign when news of an illegitimate son surfaced in the press.
(7)Some
theologians, including the Dominican Cardinal Browne, actually commented
that the Council had surprisingly little to say about the role of
theologians. But if I am right, those directing the course of the
Council could hardly have said much about theologians without showing
their hand, as it were, on the subject of Thomistic philosophy.
(8)
Pope St. Pius X, 1903-1914.
When informed of his election, it is said he cried and sobbed like
a child. Even as he wept, protesting his unworthiness, the Breton
Stigmatist and Mystic, Marie-Julie Jahenny (1850-1941) was allegedly
being told: "His will be the reign of God on earth." Unlike
his predecessor Pius VII a century earlier, when pushed against the
wall he refused to do a deal with the French Government that would
in his view inadequately safeguard the rights of the Church. Incidentally,
for those of us who refuse to believe in coincidence, he died on the
same date as Pius VII - 20 August. None of which, of course, means,
that Pius VII, who probably did what 99 out of 100 Popes would have
done, was not a great and Holy Pope; only that Pius X was possibly
an even greater and Holier one
(9)That
is to say that integrists were right inasmuch as they were 'integrists'
and not ultramontanists. That many in the 'integrist camp' were
ultramontane rather than integrist is something which the course of
history has revealed and which no doubt helps to explain the current
divide between 'Traditionalists' and 'Conservatives' -but this is
a topic which, hopefully, will be explored more fully in a future
article.
