Not the way we were

After 35 years of reading accounts of Vatican II, and the subsequent tumultuous history of the Church, a student of the literature might be forgiven for thinking that a great number of the more conservative critics hold in practice that the post-conciliar crisis sprang fully formed from the womb of the Council.

The further the student moves through the army of critics toward the more traditional flank, the more firm his impression would become. For notwithstanding some references to the origins of our present crisis, the rhetoric of the criticism, together with its weighty sense of an irreparable loss, would leave the reader with the conviction of there being a disconnection in thought between the pre- and post-conciliar history of the Church.

There is no doubt that, considered as a human phenomenon, the Council and its aftermath represent, to use Francis Fukuyma’s phrase, a “Great Disruption”. What happened in the Church during the 1960s formed part of an immense cultural revolution which has had as shattering effects upon the society of Catholic believers as upon society at large. The consequences will be with us for all of the new century, and more. But, in history, even the greatest disruptions fail to sever revolutions and their consequences from what went before. As we say of the link between men and their childhood, so too can we say of revolutions and their anciens regimes: the child is father to the man.

Father to the man

These considerations have great implications for the movement to revitalise and live anew the traditional life and worship of the Catholic Church. The purpose of the movement is to bring to bear upon the formation of the future the full and integrated Catholic tradition. Our goal is not to recapture the “way we were”; it is rather to be better than what we used to be.

Oriens, consequently, has little interest in nostalgic reminiscences about 1950s seminaries bursting at the seams and convents crammed with nuns; nor do we entertain exalted thoughts upon the recollection of great Catholic schools and educations and teaching orders; nor, in particular, do we wish to dwell in laudatory reverie upon those flourishing Catholic parishes of yesteryear and their solid liturgical life. They existed; that is a fact. But they were never quite so numerous, and not always quite so good, as memory suggests. In any case, they are no more.

One explanation of the events which tore up the pre-revolutionary map of Catholic life has it that a foreign idea invaded the Church, its adherents took control, and then laid waste around them, all within the space of half a lifetime. While it has the merit of simplicity, this hypothesis runs contrary to our experience of the deep ‘interconnectedness’ of human history; it does not explain how we got from there to here.

Another explanation is that, despite superficial signs of vigour and health, the Catholic people had been afflicted with a series of internal illnesses. The seeds of destruction had long been accumulating and developing. From the 60s onward, the symptoms became unexpectedly obvious, the disease rapidly seized upon the whole body and entered upon its ‘final’ stage. As things ran their course, the process of degeneration exposed the Church to secondary complications; as she declined, her people came into contact with new sources of infection of a kind which are ‘fatal’ for the already sick. While analogies have their limits, this one has the advantage of preserving the causal linkages between past and present.

A past less glorious

Looked at in this way, pre-conciliar times seem somewhat less glorious than has often been said. Healthy societies do not collapse at a touch. If they do, then their robustness is merely apparent and inside they have become worm eaten. Bursting seminaries do not suddenly implode. Rivers of vocations do not suddenly dry up. Fine schools and universities, their splendid teachers, do not begin to teach heresy, or to desert their posts, upon a sudden inspiration. Flourishing parishes do not begin suddenly to age, to shrivel and to empty without a history of internal decay. And so it was.

Among theologians, for example, the Church’s doctrine had been extensively corrupted from within by the 1960s. Great as St Pius X was, the force of his formal teaching was not matched by the wisdom of his disciplines. Too confident in the sufficiency of authority, and scornful of the intellectual engagement which the situation called for, his measures against Modernism sowed suspicion and resentment: hot house conditions for the survival and spread of dissent. Like a garden which has been thoroughly weeded, there was a moment when all in the Church seemed ordered and well-done. Then, what not long since had been rooted out reappeared, at first imperceptibly; finally, with a great rush it re-invested the place more thickly than before.

In 1950 Pius XII sounded a warning in Humani Generis, but little practical attention was paid to it at the time, and none afterward by his successor. When the day came for that holy innocent to “throw open the windows” of the Church - the only problem he could detect was a certain stuffiness in the atmosphere - the tares had spread to virtually every Catholic institution. And, when the fresh air and the sun flooded in, they leaped up in mass and strength.

Doctrinal deformity, however, is not by any means the whole story. There were other pathologies at work: authoritarianism, clericalism, and rigorism. The first was inculcated by the experiences of struggle from the Reformation onward. The second is a perennial which happily grazes in good times and bad. The third is the lingering influence of Jansenism upon ecclesiastical and moral discipline.

Action and reaction

“To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. It is a law, not just of physics, but of life. To authoritarianism the reply is anarchism; to clericalism, laicism; to rigorism, laxism. It is in the vices of the present that we see evidence of the old, opposite vices. We recognise in the face of the crisis we experience now, the features of the very different age which fathered it. As a result, we are not without sympathy for the people who now are (rightly) censured as liberals and heretics. Without depriving them of responsibility for their share in the havoc which has been wrought, we can fairly say that they are all children of our common past and it has helped to make them what they are.

This is why for Oriens the past is not something to re-enter or reconstruct. Quite apart from being impossible to achieve, the attempt will, inevitably, stimulate the old vices and justify the new. Paradoxically, the man who wants to go back is the enemy of tradition. To befriend and possess it, he must go forward. For us, then, we look to the past not as a destination, but as a bearing upon which to enter the future.

Perhaps we are different. We do not oppose change for itself. We do not care for useless baggage; and we have no intention of carrying it forward. But equally we decline to abandon what is good, the things the saints loved and did, the things, indeed, which made them saints: and that, above all, was the Mass and its whole liturgical context - not scaled back, not prosified, not deprived of its language, symbols, and orientation, not shorn of its musical wings, nor pinioned by ideological fashion.

What we stand for is this, and no more: the free worship of God in full, in communion, and for the reconversion of the West.

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