The
Papa Luigi syndrome:
When pontiffs lose their sense of humour
What
happens when we credit leaders with more authority than they possess? Father
John Parsons examines the historical origins of just such a tendency among
modern Catholics.
LA
tradizione sono io (I am tradition) was one of Pope Pius IX's many witticisms,
this one uttered it seems at the time of the first Vatican Council (1869-1870).
The
Pope was playfully adapting the famous remark attributed to Louis XIV
(1643-1715) l'etat c'est moi (I am the state). Neither ruler, of course,
was so silly as to mean what he said. The very making of such a remark invites
laughter and is a deliberate form of self-parody, and Pio Nono knew it.
High-minded liberal
No, it is not rulers who joke about absolute authority who are the real
danger, either in Church or state. It is the solemn, high-minded liberal, the
enlightened reformer who is convinced he is the very personification of
reasonableness, and who therefore never jokes about himself or his projects,
that we really have to fear. For he is the one who lacks that critical, and
humorous, distance from his own nostrums which is a preservative against
well-intentioned fanaticism and enlightened revolution.
None
of what we might call the ‘aggiornamentist’ popes since 1958 are recorded to
have made any such remark as Pio Nono's. Would that they had! The tragedy for
the Church has been that some of these popes have acted as if they believed in
all seriousness that they were indeed the incarnation of tradition. Paul VI's
remark, made during the years prior to the appearance of Humanae Vitae in
1968, that no change could be made to the Church's teaching on contraception
unless "Our conscience permits it", is a perfect illustration of la
tradizione sono io; as if the traditional teaching of the Church on a matter
of morals was a species of papal private property, to be disposed of as its
owner thought best. To suggest that doctrine can change at the behest of the
reigning pope is to reduce the status of the ordinary universal teaching of the
Church to a nullity, and to subvert its infallible certainty by a kind of
dogmatic positivism. Papal remarks about universal justification, evolution,
capital punishment and non-Christian ecumenism in subsequent years, have
displayed this same tendency. The Fascists used the slogan Il Duce ha sempre
ragione (The Duce is always right). The Ultramontane is a Catholic who
asserts the same about the current policy (whatever it may be) of the current
pope (whoever he may be).
If
Eastern Orthodoxy can be charged with taking tradition as its operative norm,
even to the obscuring of the present authority of the successor of Peter and to
the loss of a centre of unity, Catholicism since the mid 19th century and
especially since the 1960s, can be charged with taking the policies of the
current occupant of the Holy See and a bureaucratic centralism as its operative
norm, even to the obscuring of traditional formulations of belief and worship.
In both cases there is an imbalance that needs to be righted.
The
doctrinal and liturgical confusion within the Church, recognized very clearly by
John Paul II in a speech reported in the Osservatore Romano of 7 February
1981, and on numerous occasions since, is surely due in some measure to papal
over-optimism since 1958 about the extent to which historic embodiments of
doctrine and worship could be reformulated to minimise the cultural distance
between the Church and the now largely secularised West.
Aggiornamento
has backfired, or as Paul VI more
elegantly put it on 23 November 1973, the opening to the world became a
veritable invasion of the Church by worldly thinking. Thus, it has been the
sweeping use of papal authority to impose a kind of liberal Catholic revolution
from above, from 1959 onwards, that has been a necessary precondition and
partial cause of that confusion which Paul VI and John Paul II have,
paradoxically, lamented.
In
regard to belief, the situation in recent years has been greatly improved by the
publication of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It constitutes a masterly
exposition of traditional doctrine in modern style; a triumph of the right kind
of aggiornamento. We must pray that in the new century all Catholics and
indeed all Christians will rally around this splendid and carefully articulated
statement of Orthodoxy.
Present ills
In
regard to worship, however, the confusion produced by the liberal Catholic
liturgical revolution has hardly begun to be tackled, and it is not intended to
address the matter here. Rather, if it is true that an imbalance between
tradition and authority is partly to blame for our
present ills, let us try to understand how that imbalance has come about.
When
Pope Innocent XII Pignatelli (1691-1700) was gloriously reigning in the last
decade of the 17th century, there was no such imbalance, still less antagonism,
between authority and tradition. The Pope saw himself as the guardian of sacred
tradition, and the Christian past as not simply past, but also the living norm
for the Christian present.
Just
as Dante (1265-1321) in his Divina Commedia had seen popes as the
divinely instituted successors of Peter, but also as sometimes sinful and
unsatisfactory rulers, so Catholic orthodoxy at the end of the 17th century
preserved a healthy respect for the papacy, without indulging in any papal
personality cult of the 19th and 20th century kind. Still less was there any
notion then that a pope could abolish the traditional Roman Rite of Mass or
Office, or sanction pagan worship in Catholic churches; and the very idea of a
modernization of the Church would have been unintelligible.
All
this was true because western culture was still spontaneously traditional. It
was the rationalism of the 18th century that instituted the divorce between a
relativised past and a progressivist present. Rapid advances in historical
scholarship from the late 17th century onward and the ever-accelerating
explosion in secular knowledge and technological innovation from the 18th
century, have relativised much of what seemed absolute. Rationalist critiques of
tradition have been the favourite project of the enlightened intelligentsia from
the late 18th century, and the utopian violence of the French Revolution was the
logical outcome. In the Church an analogous spirit of rationalist enlightenment
connects Scipio de Ricci (1740-1810) and his synod at Pistoia, with Annibale
Bugnini (1912-1982) and his liturgical reform.
The
disappearance of spontaneous traditionalism in the West, and the advance of
outright unbelief, put devout Catholics and the papacy under increasing pressure
in the nineteenth century. When the Christian restoration began in 1814 with the
liberation of the Pope and the restoration of the Papal States and the Jesuits,
the old structure of Christendom lay in ruins. The great religious orders had
almost completely perished, the network of Catholic universities had been
largely destroyed, the collegiate churches with their libraries and endowed
chapters of canons had vanished, and with these losses had gone the theological
faculties with all their financial and intellectual endowments. It was this
array of institutions which had provided the social supports for Catholic
liturgical life, theological production and public piety in previous centuries.
After 1830 the renewed march of secularism overthrew or hamstrung the Catholic
monarchies, and instituted militantly anti-Catholic regimes in many hitherto
Catholic countries. This led to the selection of bishops passing from the local
government to the Roman Curia, centralizing the selection of the episcopate in a
way it had never been centralized previously. In this context, Catholic forces,
seeing their societies secularised, turned more and more towards the papacy as
providing the immediate norm for Catholic life and the focal point of Catholic
identity. It was at that period that the average pious Catholic became an
Ultramontane in the sense defined above; something he had never been in the Ages
of Faith, when "all the world" was Catholic.
Instead
of being the summit of the pyramid of Christian society, of which the base was a
spontaneous Catholic traditionalism theologically justified by the permanent
presence of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the faithful in every age, the
papacy was made, from the time of Gregory XVI (1831-1846) onwards, to carry the
whole burden of the maintenance of Catholic tradition, among a Catholic
population which, in Europe, was in the process of apostasizing from the faith,
and closing its heart to the Holy Spirit. It was as if the pyramid had been
inverted, and the foundations of a restored Christendom were to rest on the
authority of a papacy isolated in the face of a hostile world. To change the
image, when the great forest of Catholic Christendom was cut down, except for
the tallest papal tree, that remaining tree stood out in a lonely prominence
that was unimaginable in the pontificate of Innocent XII.
In
that sense, Pio Nono (1846-1878) could truly say Io sono la tradizione,
because he had become, by default, the principal upholder and last defender of
Christendom. From the fall of Rome in 1870 to the proclamation of aggiornamento
in 1959, the papacy and the Church cut a splendid, embattled figure, defying the
modern world and ostensibly keeping the guns of Christian tradition blazing. The
danger was that it was a tradition now maintained by papal fiat and bureaucratic
decree, and thus dangerously exposed to any shift or ambiguity in Vatican
policy.
And
the rest, as they say, is history...
A tradition maint
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