July-September 2008 |
Volume
13, Number 3 - Editorial |
|---|
Crisis of the bishops
It is rare that people of public rank speak
the truth unvarnished. When it happens, it is a moment to savour.
On 16 July 2008, during Solemn Vespers at St
Augustine’s, Balmain (in Sydney), Cardinal
George Pell reflected on the unfolding success of World Youth Day. He remarked
that where he once saw “ashes” in the Australian Church, he could now see
“embers”.
“Ashes” and “embers”. This is what has become of the Catholic Church, in Australia as
throughout the Western world, and the implications are dire. As we are quickly
finding out, a culture from which Catholic belief and expression have been
evacuated is an ugly, increasingly dangerous one in which to live. And the success
of WYD, obvious even to a worldly eye, is not going to make life safer.
The unsettlement
What happened at WYD is not supposed to
happen. The Church is not supposed to grab the public stage, except when thrust
into the dock by its media prosecutors. A new generation is not supposed to
find Catholic religion. Buddhism perhaps. Even Islam. But Catholic faith never.
These young Catholics are fired up and listening to “conservative” leaders.
Tomorrow they will vote. A Catholic revival could threaten the secular
settlement. A movement that has fought since the Enlightenment to make
universal public life without God is not about to apply some liberal principle
permissive of a Catholic resurgence in the homeland of atheism. WYD Madrid is a
shocking challenge. Expect the keepers of the flame to respond.
Just how Catholics are to equip themselves
culturally to face what promises to be a warmly contested future, is a
challenge. Oriens is content to leave the
economy of grace to God and the administration of sacraments to bishops. But
where the clergy does not have a monopoly of wisdom is over the symbolic forms
in which a Catholic reply to the Enlightenment might be framed.
On the whole, the bishops have believed that
a Catholic response to the Enlightenment should be formed on the assumption
that we accept it on its terms. This is the basic idea behind the redesign of
the Catholic liturgy and its translation into the vernaculars. Liturgical
reform as it happened – as distinct from how it might have been conceived – is
an Enlightenment project first essayed at the 1786 Synod of Pistoia. That Annibale Bugnini succeeded where Scipione de’ Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia, failed points to a
collapse of confidence – moral, intellectual, cultural – within the Catholic hierarchy. As
Cardinal Franjo Seper once
put it:
“The crisis in the Church is a crisis of the
bishops.”
Just over a year ago, on 7 July 2007, Pope
Benedict XVI made a church-changing decision to permit the old liturgy to stand
as an equal beside the new. Fourteen months on, many of the bishops outwardly
in communion with Rome are trying to subvert its policy. The centre of
opposition is France.
France defiant
According to Professor Luc Perrin of the
University of Strasbourg, an interested observer of the French church, the
bishops of France, led by the Archbishop of Paris and president of their episcopal conference, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois,
are pursuing a “containment policy”. The aim is to maintain the same severe
limits upon celebration of the old Mass that applied before the 1988 Ecclesia
Dei decree in the hope of claiming in 2010, when the operation of Summorum Pontificum
(SP) will be reviewed, that its provisions met no demand within France.
Meantime, aspirations to repossess the traditional liturgy will be starved of
oxygen.
Playing an aggressive role in this is Msgr Henri Brincard, Bishop of Puy-en-Velay, a man reputed to be
a “conservative” and personally attracted to the traditional liturgy. Brincard sits on the Council of the Youth Pastoral Mission
that covers France’s Catholic scouts and guides. These have a strong religious
élan and a deep vein of sympathy for Catholic tradition. Together with Msgr Albert de Monléon, Bishop of
Meaux, Brincard has gone,
reportedly, head-to-head with Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos to block the full application of SP to the French
scouting movement from which requests for the old Mass have been streaming.
Back in his diocese, Brincard, apparently, refuses to
let priests go public with the Latin Mass.
Fortunately, Vingt-Trois,
Brincard, and Monléon do
not represent all French bishops. Sufficient of them have taken a different
approach such that the “containment policy” is already looking like Bonaparte’s
continental blockade. It leaks. Some forty new traditional Mass centres have sprung up in France during the last year.
Much greater things, however, are afoot
elsewhere than in France. In the USA, especially in the dioceses of Chicago and
St Louis, and in the National American College in Rome, SP is being implemented
with decisive practicality. From now on in these places, and elsewhere in the
American church, seminarians will be trained in the use of both the old and new
forms of the liturgy. According to a well-briefed observer of the US church,
one of the gifts now commonly given to newly ordained
American priests is a 1962 altar missal.
Blowback
A dose of realism is, however, in order. The
problem posed for the French bishops by rehabilitation of the pre-conciliar liturgy is emblematic of the strategic dilemma
that confronts all bishops in the West.
The implications of Summorum
Pontificum are, understandably, frightening for
many bishops to contemplate. The “pastoral difficulties” alleged against it
(read “blowback” from clerical and lay elites whose power in the Church is tied
irrevocably to the new liturgy) are nothing as compared to the “blowback” from
society at large – from political establishments, intellectuals and the media –
should it be discovered that the bishops have welched
on, what had been supposed, their long-settled reconciliation with modernity.
Clearly, the Church in the West is going to
require something more than an arsenal of symbols to deal with this anger, but
it cannot do without them. “Identity politics” are vital to the survival of any
religion. Among the merits of the traditional Latin liturgy – and of the Latin
language itself – is its outstanding power to define Catholic identity against
the secularity of the Western vernacular republics ranged ideologically against
the Church.
As advocates of multiculturalism know full
well, preserving your language is central to preserving your identity. Our
language is Latin. Even if it is “only” a language of worship and professional
theological discourse, Latin is little less important to defining who we are as
Roman Catholics than Hebrew was in Christ’s day when the Jewish people spoke
Aramaic.
When the fragile toleration extended by
society to the Church finally gives way, Catholics might justly find themselves
out of sympathy with bishops who, unable to resolve their own crises of
identity, deprived others of the means to form and strengthen their own. For
such leaders there will be “blowback” from more than one front.
