Reviewed by Henry Norris
 

THE PERMUTATIONS of Catholicism since the 1960s have yet to find their definitive historical explanation, insofar as any historical explanation can ever be definitive. The broad sweep of events is however obvious, and it is clearly a waste of time to attempt to explain those permutations within a narrow perspective.

Catholicism reached its historical high point in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and has been in decline ever since. It was at that period that the religious orders reached their apogee in numbers, intelligence and perhaps piety as well. It was at that period that the most elaborate and thorough theological treatises were produced. It was at that period that painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture last produced original forms inspired by Catholic ideas. It was in short, at that period that culture and religion in Christendom reached their most recent unified expression in the Baroque synthesis. Eclecticism, archaizing revivalism and gradual disintegration have been the rule ever since. The best minds in western culture, which at that period were still exercising themselves within a Christian and indeed a Catholic orbit, have since been increasingly diverted towards an immanentist, this-worldly pursuit of meaning.

The divorce between religion and culture has not, of course, prevented an enormous expansion of Catholicism outside the areas occupied by Catholic societies in 1700. Colonization by the Catholic monarchies, combined with tolerance of Catholicism in the English colonies during the last two hundred years, produced a robust Catholic life outside Europe up to the eve of the Second Vatican Council. By that date, the rearguard action of the Church in the old Catholic areas of Europe, except in France, had, apparently, stalled the secularist attack. It is only against this framework that the changes in the Church since 1962 can be properly interpreted.
 

It is a fact of which Romano Amerio (1905-1997) the author of "Iota Unum", was acutely aware. His book, originally published at Milan and Naples in 1985 is an extraordinary tour de force. It is the product of a thoroughly traditional European Catholic mind, fully aware of the historical setting outlined above. Unlike most historically conscious Catholic intellectuals since 1962, and many even prior to that time, Amerio never lost his nerve. Uncowed by Catholicism's historical reverses, and immune, though not insensitive, to the allurements of Hegelianism and other specious philosophical positions, Amerio resolutely applies traditional Thomistic, and indeed Augustinian, analyses to the permutations of Catholicism since the adoption of the policy of aggiornamento by John XXIII and subsequent Popes.

Amerio perceptively identifies the "Three Syllabuses", as he calls them, which warned against the progressive victory of modern Naturalism over Catholic Supernaturalism.

The first is the Syllabus Errorum of 1864 and the accompanying encyclical Quanta Cura. The essential philosophical condemnations in the Syllabus were taken up by Vatican I in its decree Dei Filius. Amerio notes, however, that the Syllabus was directed chiefly against errors in society insofar as Christendom was then alienating itself from Catholic positions. That is, the errors were not essentially among practising Catholics but among the lapsed. The reconstruction of society on a non-Christian basis was the enterprise that the papacy was intent on preventing.

The second syllabus is the decree Lamentabili of 1907 and the accompanying encyclical Pascendi. This list of errors concerns the penetration of naturalistic ideas into religious doctrine itself, in an attempt to reconstruct the whole of Christian belief on a non-supernaturalist basis. This is Modernism. This time the error relates not to society but to the internal belief system of the Church. In other words, Naturalism has advanced from a theoretical and practical restructuring of the outer forms of Christian society, and has produced a theoretical reformulation of the nature of the Christian religion.

The third syllabus is the encyclical Humani Generis of 1950. This warns that naturalist errors have actually spread widely in influential Catholic circles, and that these errors are immediately threatening to undermine the whole of Catholic belief and practice. We have moved from a merely theoretical attack to a practical penetration of Naturalism and a spreading fascination with modernity that seeks to make Catholicism an element of the dialectic of modern thought. There is a consequent distaste for the traditional forms of Catholic philosophy and scholastic theology. There is also a desire to reduce the reality of the supernatural, and to present it, in various ways, as merely an aspect of the natural.

The next step, as the whole of Amerio's book demonstrates, is a complete about face by the papacy. In the opening speech of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John wittingly or unwittingly negated all three syllabuses by declaring that the Church would no longer analyse and refute errors opposed to Catholicism. Instead, it would, in effect, limit itself to an intellectual pacifism, by which Catholics are to hold the faith, but are not to propagate it by controverting the opposed errors. This is essential to the ecumenical enterprise, and to the attempt to put the Church at the service of all men of goodwill, without specifying goodwill toward what. Somehow we are to negate the negation between truth and error, which in context means the difference between Supernaturalism and Naturalism. One is no longer to summon the world to embrace Catholicism; Catholicism is to apply "the medicine of mercy" (Pope John's phrase) and embrace the world, which in context means embracing the Naturalist and anti-traditional culture of modernity.
 

On this view of the dynamics of the situation, Romano Amerio carefully documents from the Osservatore Romano and other official sources, the changes in attitudes to the priesthood, youth, women, sport, penance, religious and social movements, schools, catechetics, the religious orders, dialogue, the notions of faith hope and charity, the natural law, divorce, abortion, the death penalty, ethics, work and technology, democracy, philosophy and theology, ecumenism, the sacraments, the liturgy, death and judgement, as also the character and methods of Paul VI.

"Iota Unum" has been republished in Italian at least once, and has appeared in translation in French, English and Dutch. German and Spanish translations have also been begun. A third printing of the English version is to be released by Sarto House, a subsidairy of Angelus Press, in 1998.

Signor Amerio's book is an invaluable dossier of well documented facts, and close, if occasionally pedantic, argument. It is undoubtedly one of the most telling and powerful accounts of what is happening to contemporary Catholicism, and definitely worth buying.
 
 

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