In the run-up to this fall’s “Synod on Synodality,” I’ve written several essays in this journal relevant to it. I’ve addressed the demand to “welcome” and what welcome has hitherto meant in the Church. I’ve pointed to the call to conversion as the basic posture of the Church. I’ve explored the problem of invoking “experience” as a factor to “discern” what the “Holy Spirit” wants. I’ve focused on factions as providing tribal “insights” as well as how the bishops (it is supposed to be, after all, a Synod of Bishops, notwithstanding Francis’s insertion of non-bishops into its votes) should relate to those factions.
Let’s now consider another relevant problem: how to read the “signs of the times.”
Vatican II put great emphasis on “reading the signs of the times (signa temporis). The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes) is largely structured around noting and addressing the “signs of the times” of the early 1960s.
Reading the signs of the times was considered part of the Church’s task of aggiornamento, or “updating.” The two concepts have, in fact, been confused, even though Vatican II’s focus was on reading the signs of the times as the lens for ecclesiastical pastoral engagement at a given moment in Church history. The Church must, after all, engage human beings in the concrete space and time in which they live. Through the sacraments, the eternal God encounters man here and now; Christ comes to us and offers us His grace and life. The Church must bring her perennial riches and wisdom to human beings in every time and place.
The problem with confusion between “reading the signs of the times” and “aggiornamento” has been a kind of unspoken presumption that it is not a matter of the Church, or even her concrete pastoral practices addressing contemporary needs, but of the Church (and perhaps even her doctrines) needing “updating.” Those are two very different realities. Their confusion is in part responsible for some post-Vatican II theological confusion. The Church’s teaching and tradition, instead of being the norm that measures and challenges every era, was frequently transformed into the object that the times measure.
That tendency was abetted by another modern error: the Rousseauean concept of “progress.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau launched the modern conceit that history inevitably involves progress and moves towards a better future. Linear time in Rousseau’s world shapes up as “past—bad; future—good.”
You hear echoes of Rousseau in politicians who talk about how lucky we are to live with “modern progress,” that “the arc of history bends towards justice,” and that it is critical we be “on the right side of history.” That last slogan presumes history is some kind of acting subject that has its own trajectory, maybe even with a shot of consciousness or even inevitability. That is Rousseau refracted through the lens of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, whose idealism postulated a history that produces ever more inclusive “syntheses” to resolve the contradictions of previous eras. Hegelianism found its most explicit ideological embodiment in communism, which envisioned and promised the end-of-history-with-paradise-on-earth (while actually producing hell). But Hegelianism’s temptations, blended with Rousseau’s optimism about history, also beguile Western man.
But none of those ideas and ideologies is true.
However, like most heresies, those errors are appealing because they have a grain of truth to them. History is moving towards justice. But that’s not because “history” intends it, but because Jesus Christ died and rose from the grave as the “first fruits” whose harvest is the Second Coming. Because Jesus conquered sin, history will end in the triumph of good and God. That’s guaranteed.
But that does not mean that the path to triumph will be even, ever uphill, and along beatific vistas. History is not on automatic pilot and can just as readily take a detour through the deepest regions of hell. When we examine human proclivities, the latter is probably a better bet. It also reminds us that, as much as humans may contribute their widow’s mites to the process, the eschaton is not of human building but God’s grace.
Disabusing people of this facile view of a straight-line heavenwards future is critical, primarily because it’s false but also because many of those prone to aggiornamento seem almost to see the spirit of the moment, the Zeitgeist, as some kind of measuring stick for the Church.
Let’s be clear. The “spirit of the times” is not identical to and cannot be equated with the “Spirit of God,” much less where the Spirit of God wants the Church to go. As with experience, the times we live in are not automatically good. They simply are. Their goodness or evil require assessment on the basis of the Church’s faith and tradition, not the other way around. The Zeitgeist is not evidence of God showing us “the Spirit’s Will” of where to lead humanity in the latest degeneracy history offers up.
Properly reading “the signs of the times” may force us to see and judge the degeneracy in which those times are mired.
Expressed in this kind of clear language, most Catholics (even partisans of “listening” to the times) would agree that simplistic lines cannot be drawn between everything today’s world serves up and the life of a disciple of Christ. The blur usually comes when a constant appeal to “dialogue” suggests that questions which for Catholics are settled really aren’t, since so many moderns (including nominal Catholics) are more in sync with the Zeitgeist than the Heiliger Geist (Holy Spirit). Reinforced by the modern Western bias about the “progressive march of history,” you have a toxic but intoxicating brew.
Someone once noted that it is arrogant to assume that the current generation of Catholics has some superior grasp of the faith. Although, in time, the Church as a spiritual reality is not generational: the Church is those “who have gone before us, marked with the sign of faith” (Eucharistic Prayer I) as well as those to come. We are simply the momentary custodians who hold spiritual treasures in the temporal earthen vessels of hands and hearts formed from clay (2 Cor 4:7; Gen 2:7).
“What you have received” (cf. 1 Cor 11:23) is the norm that measures your times. Your times do not measure what has been passed on to you.
That is why so many have questioned the methodology of “synodal listening sessions.” Their advocates insist they are not “surveys” or the ecclesiastical version of “consumer input groups.” But—even prescinding from their groups’ sloppy and, therefore, questionably representative qualities, things that would make a secular social science practitioner blush—they leave the impression that the faith is some kind of “product” reaction to which is assessed by some privileged subset of the “faithful” (decided primarily, though not necessarily even upon the fact that once upon a time somebody baptized them).
What makes them “privileged?” That they are alive here and now to opine from that perspective and that, even within the larger Church of today, they are a minority whose opinions are recorded.
Institutionalizing this questionable methodology in a “synodal church” is a permanent invitation for dogmatic, moral, and disciplinary chaos, not organic development-within-continuity of doctrine.
“Reading the signs of the times” has been an explicit methodological approach for the Church since Vatican II. I say “explicit,” because the Church has always had to reckon with how to proclaim the Gospel in every age in which she has existed. So, it is a good methodology: the Church must speak to the “joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties of the men of [every] age” (Gaudium et spes, nr 1).
But we need to articulate a clearer hermeneutic by which to “read” those signs of the times, so that the Church reads the signs and not the signs the Church. Done properly, the Church’s doctrine will develop to address those “joys and hopes” in their proper context in a way that makes the present moment—whenever that moment is—one with the Church past, present, and future. This also ensures that reading the signs of the times is a religious and theological exercise, not a sociological poll—while hopefully also making clear the difference between the two.
Finally, that reading must be conducted not within the confines of a facile modernist and post-modernist “progressive history” but within the sober perspectives of Christian eschatology, which knows both the terminus of history as well as the challenges human freedom poses to getting there.
Ultimately, our challenge is to see history through Christian eyes, not Christianity through the eyes of Rousseau and Hegel. Keeping our eyes on the eschatological prize also keeps us from immanentizing the Christian Gospel in the ideologies and projects of the moment. As William Inge and Fulton Sheen both observed, marrying the spirit of the age augurs rapid widowhood.
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Jesus read the sign of the times. In response, He confronted those signs, proclaimed a Gospel of repentence, and the promise of His Father’s forgiveness. He came among us as ‘God made man’ to address the signs of the times. And when He did, they killed him.
Thank you John. The second worldwide attempt to cancel Christ is accelerating. The first was largely doctrinal. Today is primarily pastoral. No major institution or country will be unscathed. JPII was a new St. Alexander of Alexandria and BXVI a new St. Athanasius. They were providentially placed to give the Church all it needed to overcome these attempts at universal dechristianization. The long struggle against heteropraxy is still in early innings. .Catholicism without the Cross. Communion without Repentance. Mercy without Justice. Religion without Reason.
Very astute analysis of a thinking well educated intellectual. The difficulty of our times is the inadequate lack of education in philosophy where colleges are miserable failures in not presenting Aristotle or Aquinas but propagandizing a sloppy mixture of Hegel, Marx and pseudo social science.
Unfortunately, that’s the formation that most priests get in seminary. I know this from talking to priests whose formation focused on philosophy and I noticed how confused they were.
Is Mr. Grondelski available to edit the IL?
The Church’s teaching and tradition, instead of being the norm that measures and challenges every era, was frequently transformed into the object that the times measure (Grondelski).
Reason is actually the measure of truth, not the rule. Grondelski accurately postulates Church teaching as the rule [shall we wonder why rules have been so pejoratively held during this pontificate?]. Rousseau’s Emile, the ideal man free from all tradition [especially religion] that stifles his just independence. Robespierre, a lawyer and defender of the poor, cherished the Emile’s philosophy of freedom and equal justice, when in the seat of national power caved in to despotism and the guillotine when threatened. Hegel perceived history constantly adapting to the times in thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
The signs of the times, during this exceptional period when never before in the history of Mankind have we experienced universal contradiction with the past, in which men have fragmented their identity with no end in sight both in the secular world, and significantly within religion, these signs [a form of collective suicide] if not soon corrected point to an apparent climactic end.
“[W]e need to articulate a clearer hermeneutic by which to ‘read’ those signs of the times, so that the Church reads the signs and not the signs the Church.” Indeed we do. All this Synod-on-Synodality nonsense seems deliberately designed to turn Almighty God into an image and likeness of Us! Maybe we need a bit more than “a clearer hermeneutic.” Maybe we need to wake up and smell the coffee. As we doze, the very Heart and Essence of our Church is being changed.The “signs of the times” are already in charge of our Church.
As a convert I have often wondered if some of the problem is simple ignorance of the content of holy scripture. I have met numerous Catholics who not only don’t read the Bible but look down on those who do. How can they tell truth from falsehood when they are told that something is or is not Biblical if they don’t know what the Bible says? Or is it considered simply too hard, like learning Latin and how grateful they are that they don’t have to learn it, not realizing they are cutting themselves off from the great depth of Catholic teaching and expression of faith? I read a translation of Adoro te devote and it doesn’t quite say what the Latin does because of the modern connotations of English words. Sorry I got off the track, having a bad mental day.
Thank you very much Dr. Grondelski for this article and thank you Raymond for your comment.
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”( Hebrews: 13,4). The Zeitgeist is not. I believe therefore that while those who control the Vatican may embrace the Zeitgeist (as has happened in past times in history), the Church as the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ will not.
https://thewandererpress.com/catholic/news/our-catholic-faith/why-change-is-francis-only-constant/
Saint Cardinal Newman’s reflections on The Antichrist are perhaps the only way to interpret Open Apostasy paralysing the Eclipsed Post-Conciliar Shipwreck. If the heart of the Catholic Church is Rome, she is already in pre-cardiac arrest. The pounding of daily side altar masses has been replaced with eery silence.
Has the Synodal Church chosen the Hegelian or the Christian understanding of Gaudium et spes? “Christ entered this world to give witness to the truth, to rescue and not to sit in judgment, to serve and not to be served.(2)” (Paragraph 3)
With “the truth” undefined, men will supply the meaning. A field hospital does not sit in judgment. She serves the afflicted. Which master shall be served? Christ or an image and likeness made in a Hegelian/Rousseau conception of Him?
The Synod is perfectly timed and perfectly positioned to serve Gaudium’s men of this age: “1. The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”
Message received. We await confirmation and clarification by apostolic exhortation or the more authoritative ‘ex cathedra’ teaching.
Do they dare disturb the universe?
We read: “Ultimately, our challenge is to see history through Christian eyes, not Christianity through the eyes of Rousseau and Hegel.” About falsified “bridges” and “welcoming,” St. Paul said it this way:
“Do not yoke yourselves in a mismatch with unbelievers. After all, what do righteousness and lawlessness have in common, or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What accord is there between Christ and Belial, what common lot between believer and unbeliever? Tell me what agreement there is between the temple of God and idols. You are the temple of the living God [….] Since we have these promises, beloved, let us purify ourselves from every defilement of flesh and spirit, and in the fear of God strive to fulfill our consecration perfectly” (2 Corinthians, 6:14-7:1).
Is it bad that I’ve stopped caring all together? They can have their empty churches. Enjoy.
“The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see Cardinals opposing Cardinals, bishops against other bishops. The priests who venerate Me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres… churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises.
If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them.”
Our Lady of Akita went on:
“Pray very much the prayers of the Rosary. I alone an able still to save you from the calamities which approach. Those who place their confidence in me will be saved.”
“The message of Akita is essentially that of Fatima.” Ratzinger.
No longer care? Indifference to the imminent loss of so many souls must awaken us to Rosaries. Rosaries offered in reparation at all the World’s abandoned altars – and how many abandonned side-altars cry out since the Post-Conciliation of the Divine Institution with the Prince of this World?
Brave Heart Anon.
This period of Apostasy is also one of the greatest periods of Maryrdom and opportunities for Sainthood !
I should’ve been more clear. I no longer care about the machinations of liberal clerics/bishops. Don’t care what Rime does. They can have the buildings. They will be empty. Orthodox Catholicism will survive. I experienced this as an Anglican. Solid Anglicans survive and thrive. Liberal Anglicans/Episcopalians have buildings, but no parishioners. It will be the same if reforming Catholics get their way.
The caution is clear: It is the Church reading the signs of the time and not the times reading the Church. Thank you Dr.
If the linear progress of Reasseau’s history is the acceptable are we better of as the Church of empty pews today?
Reading the signs of time must remain Christological in reference to the eschatological interpretations. We are destined for God, and so, is human history, which also needs redemption.
Of all the many failures of VII, “reading the signs of the times” is arguably the most glaring. Both at the end of the Council in 1965 and in the present day, it has usually consisted of mindlessly embracing whatever political causes secular “progressives” happen to espouse in the moment. “Misreading” the signs of the times, in other words, often with impenetrable smugness.
I look at the Signs by referring to the appirations of the Virgin Mary.
Fr. Bauer: I’m in no way meaning to be disrespectful, but I often find Marian apparitions frustrating. All of the “secrets” and conditions etc. Endless fighting about messages. It’s probably in how they are presented or my fault in misunderstanding, but I find the Marian apparition world to be exhausting (especially as a convert from Anglicanism).Sometimes they feel like game playing (again, probably in how they’re presented by well meaning people). Our Lord taught very clearly and openly (John 18:20). Why are Marian apparitions so shrouded in mysteries, secrets and confusion? Again, no disrespect meant to Our Lady.
Andrew, because much if the time the Apparitions are concerned with Post-Conciliar Apostasy from faith and morals: the Modernist Heresy. She -the coredemptrix – has been the Apostates’ problem since the 1800s. And right down to the most recent phenomena of weeping and bleeding statues in Akita and Italy the messages are clearly a call to Catholicism.
Our blessed Mother essentially warns the faithful of the imminent danger of losing their souls, while the Apostate-heavy Hierarchy no longer gives two hoots…
Perhaps, the church should concentrate some of her efforts to convey the truths of the faith once she has clearly communicated the truth about fallen man, his nature, what goods run parallel with his nature, etc. to her priests, deacons, bishops, cardinals and popes. She should start by “de-mystifying” man. She should begin with GOOD philosophy rooted in REALISM. Sadly, when the protestant reformation shattered the Catholic World View it created a vacuous hole within which the pseudo-Catholics, separatists and revolutionaries stuffed lack-luster philosophers like Hegel, Rousseau, Locke, Mill, Decartes, etc. That road eventually led to Kant who represents the inversion of all values and the kind of cognitive dissonance that leads directly to existentialism and nihilism. I hate to tell most people that the answer to their confusion about many of their lives issues resides in the noble thought of the Scholastics some 800 years ago; but, I have no choice. I have been blessed to know the history of ideas and their impact on the “definition” of man.