America Magazine recently ran an article by Mary McAuliffe entitled “Women and LGBTQ Catholics are paying the price for church unity” (Jan. 2, 2024). The essay is completely unremarkable except insofar as it underscores and illustrates a point I made in an article last year on this site entitled “The liberal and flawed roots of tiresome synodal grievances”.
Allow me to quote its opening paragraphs at length to reestablish the point at hand:
One of the things I have learned in my 65 years of being a Catholic is that the unquestioned meaning of the term “Church reform” in the post Vatican II era is that it is almost exclusively viewed as a cognate for “liberalization”. Why this is so and how it came to be this way is a story too complex to rehearse here. But it is sufficient for my purposes to simply note the brute facticity of this reality with an eye toward its ongoing significance for our “new way of being Church” in our brave new era of “synodal listening”.
Nor do we need to spend any time analyzing the typical laundry list of issues that the so-called reformers wish to address. From women’s ordination to contraception to LGBTQ everything, the central intellectual impulses are all the same: what the Church has taught for centuries has been wrong, or at least wrong now for our “times”, and needs to be changed in deeply constitutive ways to fit into our “new cultural paradigm”.
Left unarticulated and largely ignored in this avalanche of Newspeak verbiage is just how expressive the Catholic iteration of liberal modernity is to the central thesis that animates all of the variegated versions of modernity. And that is what I call the “teleology of transgression” wherein all that came before via the pathways of culture and tradition are recast as oppressive restrictions on our freedom from which we now need to liberate ourselves. Thus, all that came before, especially in the moral, spiritual, and religious domain, must be erased if one is a pure secularist, or must be simply redefined and reshaped, if one wishes to retain some religious identity, to conform to the new ordo of liberative transgression.
This is precisely the mentality that captured the Church in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, as anyone who lived through that era can attest.
According to this narrative—the narrative of the “spirit of Vatican II”—the Second Vatican Council was an “event” that established a “liberative dynamic of change” in the name of some vague populist renderings of “the people of God”. And, further, all the changes were justified on the grounds that the Church must follow the Holy Spirit by reading “the signs of the times”. There was never an emphasis on the signs of the times being read and interpreted through the lens of the Holy Spirit’s past movements in Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterial teaching.
Rather, the opposite, with the presumption being that vast swaths of Church practice and doctrine “must” change lest the Church fall into irrelevance to “modern man”. And “modern man” always appeared as a construct that was synonymous with “secular, Western, man”.
The tired hermeneutic of rupture continues rupturing
Therefore, as the headline on a January 6th National Catholic Reporter article on Cardinal Robert McElroy’s new appointment makes clear, the language of “reform” really is quite often just a synonym for “liberalization”: “Pope Francis picks an advocate for church reform for Washington, DC”.
Therefore, the actual documents of the Council were interpreted with this hermeneutic of rupture in mind, which allowed for the emergence of a kind of “canon within the canon” approach to conciliar interpretation with documents being neatly dissected into “progressive” vs “traditional” currents of theology. The former were then used as the main interpretive key, which allowed for dismissing the latter as the last gasps of a now surpassed Baroque Catholicism.
There was no sense here at all of a wholistic interpretive approach where, as Pope Benedict often noted, the various conciliar statements must be read in light of the whole of the Council and in light of the whole of Tradition. This is, after all, how councils have always been properly interpreted. And it is most certainly how the Council Fathers expected the texts they were approving to be interpreted as can be seen in the debates on the Council floor where adherence to Tradition, even as it was being nuanced and developed in some instances, was a central concern.
But in the new transgressive mood of revolutionary rupture, this hermeneutical stance was also dismissed as part of a now, allegedly, discredited conservative rendering of the development of doctrine which held that all doctrinal change is viewed in material continuity with what came before and must, therefore, be organic in its development. The progressive destruction of this hermeneutic happened through the poisoning of the wells of discourse on a grand scale since the more one appealed to the actual documents of the Council, or Tradition, the more one was dismissed as a simplistic purveyor of a theologically shallow, and now “discredited”, hermeneutic of continuity.
This is a very convenient theological parlor trick, just as it was sixty years ago, insofar as it puts the more tradition-minded Catholic immediately upon the defensive as an enemy of “lived experience” and “the people of God”. And, more importantly, as an opponent of the Holy Spirit’s movement for “reform”. After all, who wants to be viewed as an enemy of the Holy Spirit?
This is a theological reality that conservative critics of progressive Catholicism still have a hard time getting their minds around. Arguments such as “But that is not what Lumen Gentium says!” or “But Sacrosanctum Concilium never called for these changes!” utterly miss the point of the hermeneutic of rupture. All that matters in this hermeneutic is that Vatican II, as an event, lifted the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido, allowing for a thorough revisionism and relitigation of all that came before.
And make no mistake, there is a real theological challenge here, which cannot be dismissed with the catch-all term of “theological dissent from established teachings”. The challenges mounted against traditional moral teachings in the realm of human sexuality were part of a larger theological project. That project included a “low Christology,” a “low ecclesiology,” and a “low soteriology” wherein the very normativity of magisterial teaching is precisely what is being questioned.
This concatenation of various liberal theological voices captured the Catholic academic theological guild—and that “capture”, with some noteworthy exceptions, remains with us to this day.
The revolutionary shift from Church to the world
And just to be clear, I am not concerned here with those post-conciliar, progressive Catholics whose main goal was a less clericalistic Church and one more focused on lay involvement. I share that concern, even if I disagree with other elements of their theology. But that branch of progressive Catholicism did not come to dominate the theological guild the way more revolutionary elements did. The goal of the revolutionary movement was the decentering of the Church as such as the privileged location for the movement of the Holy Spirit–a movement now to be more associated with the dynamical structures of general human history and individual subjectivity.
This shift in focus from the Church to the world as the privileged locus for the movement of the Spirit is also what lies behind the constant pre- and post-synodal emphases on “listening” to the Spirit and “walking together in the Spirit”. A big deal was made by the synod organizers about the pre-Synod listening sessions, and yet very few actually think the listening sessions were serious exercises in scientific opinion gathering, or cares what these listening sessions produced.
Furthermore, their proceedings are hidden in the curated annotations of an elite curial few who filtered the various “findings” and rendered them into digestible bits for synodal consumption. And nobody in their right mind thinks the 1% of Catholics who bothered to participate in the listening sessions did speak for the whole of the “people of God” in some deeply representative way. Or that they were the very irruption of the voice of the Holy Spirit in a manner clear enough to clear the decks of Church doctrines on all manner of issues.
Instead, the listening sessions were a convenient cover in the guise of a faux “democratic process” of “consulting” the people of God in order to promote a cultural agenda of rupture and change in varying levels of intensity. This is the same ecclesial rhetoric employed after the Council; it should not surprise us that the post-conciliar era and the Synod are linked at the hip in this rhetorical game. After all, the main proponents of the Synod have explicitly linked the two events together and have stated explicitly that the Synod represents the fulfillment of the Council, even if it is never specified as to how this is so.
But they don’t have to. What liberal Catholics saw in the Synod, no matter how vague its definition, was the continuation of the revolution. A revolution of rupture that was momentarily interrupted by the retrograde papacies of the two reactionaries, Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, but which now has a small opening in the current papacy, no matter how ambiguous and incoherent Pope Francis’s contradictory signals have become.
It is critical to note that the “spirit of Vatican II” is not an utterly vacuous concept that can mean anything the reformers wanted it to mean. There was a specific cultural agenda in play, and this agenda has remained largely unchanged in the past sixty years. Therefore, we also err if we think the post-synodal emphasis on “process” and “listening” is a benign articulation of some anodyne point of ecclesial discipline that means next to nothing. It is the recrudescence of the hermeneutics of rupture viewed by its purveyors as the proprietary watermark of the very movement of the Spirit.
In other words, the more the rupture, the more likely is the presence of the Spirit. Thus do we see that the categories of the utterly “novel” and the “new”—categories viewed as novel and new precisely in direct inverse relation to that which they are overturning–become markers of a form of spiritual “creativity” now lionized as “courageous”.
Along these lines, one of the key intellectual linkages between then and now is the ongoing power of the “curve of history” and “the end of history” forms of thought. For tradition-minded Catholics such as myself one of the most annoying features of progressive Catholic theology is its smug self-assurance that it is on the “right side of history” in both an intellectual and a moral sense. In their minds the ultimate vindication of their views is inevitable, and resistance is futile. Furthermore, in their minds more conservative Catholics are not merely “wrong” on a theological level, but they are morally bad people and/or psychologically compromised people who are motivated by irrational fears, bigotries of all sorts, and deep misogyny.
Therefore, the prevailing strategy of the theological rupturists has been one of lying low and waiting for the inevitable vindication of their views once the “right pope” is in place.
The obsessive push for a Church that “agrees with me”
Returning then to the essay by McAuliffe in America, we see that it is a perfect example of this genre, only now tainted with a deep impatience and sense of frustration. Paraphrased in its bald reality the title should read: “How long, oh Lord, must we wait for our misogynistic and homophobic Church to change to the correct point of view?” McAuliffe directly links this exasperation with the hopes she and her friends had placed in the Synod as the advent of a new “listening Church”, which only underscores the sort of “end of history” inevitability she sees her views representing.
Because after all, how could a more “listening Church” not see how transparently and manifestly true her views on sex and gender are? How long must we wait for our cis-gendered patriarchy to see how thoroughly wrong Church teaching is?
There is no hint in the essay of self-doubt or introspection. There is no hint of an acknowledgment that weighty theological, anthropological, and metaphysical issues hang in the balance. There is no hint of an awareness of the theological arguments presented against her position. There is no spirit of dialogue or, tellingly, of “listening” on her part to voices other than those of herself and her friends. Apparently, and this is all too typical, what she seems to mean by a “listening synodal Church” is nothing more than a Church that “agrees with me”.
There is also no hint in the essay that one does need to grapple with the normativity of past Church teachings on these issues. As with all good rupturists, this seems not to matter, and it is sufficient to assert without further qualification that the Church is simply wrong on these issues and needs to change. QED.
Finally, McAuliffe mentions that Sean Michael Winters, over at The National Catholic Reporter, has stated that women and LGBTQ Catholics must simply set aside their grievances with Church teaching in order to preserve ecclesial unity. But she bristles at this suggestion on the grounds that a listening Church needs to start taking her pain and that of the “LGBTQ community” as the normative baseline for what constitutes the “lived experience” of “the people of God”.
Why their pain and not that of others–for instance, Catholics who love the traditional Latin Mass and are now tossed out into the peripheries–she does not say. She offers no hedonic calculus for adjudicating between competing pain claims.
There is a reason for that. It is because she does not think she has to supply us with such a calculus. The mere assertion of gender and sex grievance is sufficient.
Grievance lives loudly in many of these synodal enthusiasts. They seek transgressive rupture. Those of us who oppose this agenda need to remember this is an open-ended project with no theological or logical limits. It is an ongoing revolution against which we must mount theological, and not merely magisterial, arguments.
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We read: “…the point of the hermeneutic of rupture. All that matters in this hermeneutic is that Vatican II, as an event, lifted the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido, allowing for a thorough revisionism and relitigation of all that came before.”
THE infinitely more real “event” that came before and from above, of course, is the concrete and historical INCARNATION. About which, Ratzinger recentered the Council’s initial draft of “Dei Verbum” to focus on the EVENT of the Incarnation. Rather than regurgitating later Church paperwork about this event.
Of “the great mystery of the Incarnation,” itself/Himself, Pope Benedict has called it more than “astonishing,” but “alarming,” and Von Balthasar says it this way:
“In everything that had previously happened in history–in the covenant between God and man, in the law, in the prophetic word, in the cultic sacrifice–something like a dialogue was initiated. But a DEFINITIVE [italics] self-showing, self-saying, self-giving had not taken place. For that, something else would have been necessary […] And for those who felt the impact of this collision [a ‘collision’!], this would have been preposterous, inconceivable: for God is in his heaven and we are on earth, since God of course is spirit and we are bodies […] impossible that this THING [!] italics is the one, all-encompassing God […] ‘What we have seen, heard, and touched with our hands is the Word of eternal life'” (John’s First Epistle). (von Balthasar, “Epilogue,” Ignatius, 2004).
QUESTION: To remember the incarnation EVENT as the only real discontinuity, and as more than an idea…how is it that this anamnesis is now exiled by the idea/process of synodality with its sophomoric hermeneutic of rupture?
“The former were then used as the main interpretive key, which allowed for dismissing the latter as the last gasps of a now surpassed Baroque Catholicism.”
But Larry you adopt this exact approach on religious liberty. This embrace of rupture here is what caused the whole structure to come down. Now you are Johnny come lately regarding continuity? You are more upset that Francis breaks with the Communio Popes. “Reactionary” John Paul II never missed a chance for some extravagant inter religious gesture and you never had anything negative to say about that. Or the fact that Latin Mass attendees were at the margins of JPII’s groaningly long papacy. Hermeneutic of continuity died when Benedict resigned.
Not true. One of the disadvantages of these kinds of essays is that they need to be as brief as possible, and this one is already overly long. Therefore, it was not possible to go into all of the nuances of what constitutes “continuity”. I have, however, written on this before. Pope Benedict spoke of a “hermeneutics of reform” as a tandem concept to any hermeneutic of continuity. And what he meant by this is that the Church does indeed need to engage in what he called “micro ruptures” with some elements of recent Church teachings, but precisely in the service of a deeper continuity to truths of Revelation that had been a bit obscured. I subscribe to this view of continuity as a reform that sometimes requires small ruptures for the sake of a deeper continuity.
Religious freedom, which you are apparently against, and the Church’s teaching at Vatican II on that topic, is a case in point. I have neither the time nor the inclination to go into detail about how Benedict saw Dignitatis Humanae as perfectly in accord with the Church’s deepest traditions about how the faith must never be coerced. We can debate this point for sure, but to accuse those of us who support DH with engaging in the same kind of radical rupture that my article is addressing is just absurd in the extreme. Only someone who is completely ignorant of Church history could claim that the Church has never made these kinds of small course corrections here and there. And DH really is just a small course correction since it explicitly affirms that it is in no way changing Church teaching on the topic in any deep way.
And your disdain for St. Pope John Paul II is duly noted. I do not criticize his inter religious overtures because, as any objective observer not tainted by pseudo traditionalist biases knows, JPII was the Pope of Dominus Iesus, Veritatis Splendor, Fides et Ratio, Evangelism Vitae, and Redemtor Hominis, all of which were robust defenses of the objective truths of Revelation and of the total necessity and centrality of Christ for salvation. Everywhere JPII went he preached the centrality of Christ for salvation. If you cannot see the difference between JPII and the current pontificate I cannot help you. Because to accuse JPII of promoting religious relativism and indifferentism is beyond ridiculous.
No one can ultimately “prove” that DH is merely a necessary “micro-rupture” made on the way to teaching something which is otherwise “in continuity” or is instead a full “rupture.” However, the Magesterium says DH is in continuity. We can accept that, or not. But, when the Magesterium says “it’s ok to bless gay unions now” I note that you take issue with the Magesterium.
What this all points to is a crisis in the authority and meaning of the Magesterium. Those who questioned the normativity of the Magesterium therefore had a point which must be further studied and discussed. As should now be clear to everyone, a rejection of the binding nature of magesterial teaching is a sword that can cut anyone whether traditionalist, liberal, conservative, or progressive.
I’m not sure we can talk about “small course corrections” when it comes to religious liberty. I actually agree with the modern position, but let’s not pretend there aren’t papal writings of significant weight that talk about how it is just to bring heretics for being heretics.
One of the issues with V2 (and the church more broadly) is that it switches things up and then says “and we have always taught basically this.” Well, no, it hasn’t and sometimes I think it would all be easier if the Church (and supporters of whatever position it has) could say “We now teach this. Popes Whatever Their Name were wrong here and here and here and yeah, the Magisterium definitely screwed it up here and here.”
For obvious reasons they don’t want to do that, but then we are left magically reconciling “burn heretics” with “religious liberty is awesome”.
It’s important to distinguish between opinions of theologians and other clerics, and between what is infallible truth and what is not or only a prudential judgment contingent upon changing circumstances (e.g., what historically is meant by usury).
Take, for example, Vatican I and its precise definition on what is exactly covered an not covered by “papal infallibility”. Cardinal Newman initially objected to this possible definition because he and others thought it “inopportune” in terms of upsetting any dialogues with the Protestants. But, now, consider the morass of the “tyranny of relativism” that threatens to overwhelm the rudderless modern world…
About papal infallibility, the 19th-century Newman (also regarded as “the father of Vatican II”) fully accepted the definition as written, and even provided this clarification:
“What have excommunication and interdict to do with infallibility? Was St. Peter infallible on that occasion at Antioch when St. Paul withstood him? Was St. Victor infallible when he separated from his communion the Asiatic Churches? Or Liberius when in like manner he excommunicated Athanasius? And, to come to later times, was Gregory XIII, when he had a medal struck in honour of the Bartholomew massacre? Or Paul IV in his conduct towards Elizabeth? Or Sixtus V when he blessed the Armada? Or Urban VIII when he persecuted Galileo? No Catholic ever pretends that these Popes were infallible in these acts” (from a Letter to the Duke of Norfolk in Vincent Blehl, editor, “The Essential Newman,” Mentor Omega, 1963, page 269).
True enough, the first Assisi gathering (1986) was handled most poorly, and kissing the Qur’an was probably equivalent to the Pachamama gathering in the Vatican Garden. But, are you suggesting that such gaffs now should be increased and multiplied (!) and even written into the ordinary magisterium of the Church?
No, religions in the world are not ecumenically converging. But the confusion might be, that however poorly expressed in such religions, the universal natural law is, as we all know, universal. The natural law as distinct and apart from Revelation.
As for Benedict, for non-amnesiacs he lives on here in his writings. And, somewhere among his clarifying writings, he distinguishes religious self-expressions (!) of “belief” from “faith’ in the divine Self-disclosure (!) as the unique, concrete and historical (more than any idea!) mystery of the Incarnation: the person of Jesus Christ.
Continuity, rather than rupture, within the sacramental and Eucharistic Church.
Dr Chapp is correct in his analysis. I, too, suffered through plenty of claptrap about “listening” and ‘experience.” Human wrongs do not change that much: the means to do wrong may, but the underlying motives and acts really don’t. So, incessantly listening to unending “dialogue” to yabber about what has long been settled doctrine is something I have no time to waste for. And ‘experience’ is neither good nor bad; it IS. Whether it is good or bad, i.e., worth examining or not, depends on the hermeneutic by which you interpret it. Mere facticity of experience is, however, as Chapp rightly notes, the ‘parlor trick’ used to run debates about things that should be undebatable.
I too agree Dr Chapp is correct in his typically deep and extraordinarily sound analysis.
In this week’s Lectionary readings from 1 John, the Holy Spirit directs us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” Dr Chapp certainly helps to expose the false prophets of our day.
Thanks John. And you have correctly identified the neuralgic point in all of this: the vague and underdetermined category of “experience” as the beginning point for theology.
Vatican Council II was hijacked by those with a shallow Catholic faith and the Church was turned into an institution that worships Man and Self.
Most of us here who have been around since the late 1960’s recognize what I’m referring to and could effectively help comprise a list of the names of the major actors in this regard. Francis and his minions have set about to punish those who object to this highjacking.
Note to Francis and his minions: Christ is the Victor and will remain so despite your efforts to unseat Him.
Dr Chapp, you have done a superior job of unveiling the truth behind the current Zeitgeist of the Church with respect to the tactics of those who espouse the hermeneutics of rupture. I suspect that, as a result, you will be the recipient of a great deal of evil name-calling by those selfsame proponents of disruption. If you are looking for a next step, might I kindly suggest that what is needed is a clearly articulated way forward for those who are of a traditional mindset. Crying in our tea will not even begin to arrest the damage: what is needed in a concrete plan to seize control of the conversation.
Thanks. But in reality the progressives tend to just ignore me by and large. Most of the vitriol that I get comes from the pseudo traditionalists who dislike my love for Communio/Ressourcement theology and the papacies that exemplified it (JPII/Benedict). They tend to lump this theology together with all modern theology and consign it to the dump heap they call “modernism”. But this is beyond superficial and is profoundly counterproductive.
True. Catholic theology in the United States operates on a schizophrenic plane: there is one in most “Catholic” colleges/universities, and another in seminaries and with some of us writing in the journals. And, yes, it is absolutely not helpful that some people pretend the theological richness of Karol Wojtyla and Josef Ratzinger should be written off as unnecessary, as if 1550s/1950s theology could be ceaselessly repeated. Take a category like “human nature.” It’s essential to understanding things like gender ideology. But people don’t even know what it means. So, to pretend that all would be sweetness and light if we just reprinted and quoted Garigou-Lagrange is, most charitably, simplistic.
Brother Larry,
As always, you prove yourself to be a highly intellectual man with a firm grasp on the unfair human activity in Holy Mother Church in our present moment in time. And may I humbly offer up what may be of some assistance for us, as to WHY we are having this over liberalization, as you refer to it. And to this I would suggest that we read and ponder the prophet voices of the Malachi Martin, the Blessed Archbishop Fulton Sheen, as well as Archbishop Vigano and Bishop Strickland. The two former souls prophecies, along with the two later present day prophets utterances of great spiritual wisdom, she great light on why and how Satan’s evil cancer has infiltrated Holy Mother Church here on Earth. You may very well begin to connect the dots as to “WHY” all this liberalization in the Church has been taking place. I share this with great charity for you and all here.
Come Lord Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
JCALS
1. The irony of the purveyors of the “low” project almost never questioning the normativity of the papal magesterium of a certain PF should be noted, repeated, and shouted without limit.
2. “Ecclesiastical libido” strikes me as unfortunate phrasing…
Be careful, Larry. Mike Lewis is a staunch defender of Mary on twitter – you’ll get all the WPI types bent out of shape and Pedro Gabriel will write (another) book about how “akshually, the Church has always been in favour of honosexuality”.
“Unburdened by what has gone before.”
Isn’t Pope Francis teaching us something though, above and beyond suffering patiently his reign-he is governing. He is governing in an unjust fashion, but he is doing it. Why were so many heretical-let’s drop “dissenter”-seminary professors, bishops, and laity in positions of authority tolerated, indeed, promoted? I’m not the first to call attention to it, but the otherwise beautiful and great pontificates of St. JP II and Benedict were not notable for governance. It seems to me that ironically Francis ascending to the throne, which was made possible, in part, by undue tolerance of many bishops and Cardinals is teaching us something. Love is patient and long suffering so I could be wrong but justice is also the foundation of love.
“A revolution of rupture that was momentarily interrupted by the retrograde papacies of Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, but which now has a small opening in the current papacy”, Chapp’s uptake is true. Except it’s not “a small opening in the current papacy”, even if it comes across as such. Decentralization was suggested by John Paul II, spreading the authoritative wealth so to speak for sake of reconciliation:
“The Holy See already endeavors to intervene with the leaders of nations and the heads of the various international bodies or seeks to associate itself with them, conduct a dialogue placing its institutional structure and moral authority, which are altogether unique, at the service of concord and peace” (Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliation and Penance 130 1984). It’s clear however the intent to decentralize was momentary for sake of dialogue while retaining the ‘altogether unique authority’ of the Church.
Francis I however retains absolute control while deconstructing the centralized authority of the Chair of Peter. While Francis, as Chapp says, is here, there, and everywhere, has offered clarity on his intent to liberalize Catholicism [via Synodal debate on doctrine and Spirit channeling] when stating the DDF is no longer a detection and prosecutorial agency, rather a platform for theological groundbreaking.