I firmly believe in the importance of newspaper subscriptions, and proudly pay for my Seattle Times and Bellingham Herald subscriptions each cycle. But I have been lacking a national newspaper, and just this week I ended up subscribing to the New York Times. I assure it is not because I am impressed with their religion coverage (quite the opposite!), though I will say I am enjoying the daily crossword immensely. Instead, it is because they have in their employ a certain Ross Douthat, whom I consider to be one of the most important Catholic voices in the U.S. today, and to read his column regularly I needed a subscription.
In fact, in the last month Douthat has published three columns that I think every Catholic ought to engage with, and I am really sorry these are behind a paywall (though you should have 5 free NYT articles per month):
- “How Catholics Became Prisoners of Vatican II” (Oct. 12)
- “How Vatican II Failed Catholics – and Catholicism” (Nov. 4)
- “What the Pro-Life Movement Lost and Won” (Nov. 12)
A brief selection from the first article might help explain why I think it is an important conversation:
Tradition has always depended on reinvention, changing to remain the same, [and] Vatican II was called at a moment when the need for such change was about to become particularly acute. But just because a moment calls for reinvention doesn’t mean that a specific set of reinventions will succeed, and we now have decades of data to justify a second encapsulating statement: The council was a failure.
This isn’t a truculent or reactionary analysis. The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike — but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest.
Now, if you have been paying any attention to my preaching over the last three years, you will know that I love the Second Vatican Council (or, at least, the Council itself and its documents, not necessarily the post-conciliar implementation). As Catholics, we are bound to regard the documents of Vatican II as infallible and protected by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible for an ecumenical council united with the Pope to teach error. But we are allowed to ask, as Mr. Douthat has done, whether a given Council has actually achieved the goals it set out to achieve. In fact, his second column mentions two others to consider:
Does anyone believe, for instance, that the Fifth Lateran Council of 1512-17 needs to be held up as a great work of the Holy Spirit when it clearly failed to do anything useful to prevent the Protestant Reformation that began the year it ended? Even the Council of Trent plainly failed in some of its objectives, since it did not reconcile Lutherans or re-Catholicize Northern Europe or prevent the Thirty Years’ War.
And this is the importance of the conversation: given that the Church provides clearly delineated dogmatic boundaries in which we must play the game of Catholicism, and one of those lines will forever be the Second Vatican Council, is the way we are currently playing the game working? Are we achieving our goals? If not, what else can we do within the Church to do better?
This all sets up Mr. Douthat’s thesis in his second article, which I will be chewing on for a while:
The question of Sunday Mass-going is a good example. Technically, the church never […] lifted the weekly obligation. But when an array of customs that reinforced that obligation were relaxed, from the requirement to fast before Mass to the emphasis on regular confession, the tacit message was the one […] received — that the time of stringent rules was over, that henceforth the church would be defined by a more, well, American sort of flexibility.
The idea was not simply to make Catholicism easier, of course; the hope was that a truer Christianity would flourish once rote obedience diminished. But the policy and the results, not the hopes, are what we should be interested in three generations later. And in and of itself, a policy of easing burdens was hardly a crazy idea of how the church might adapt to modernity and keep Catholics in the pews. Spiritual issues aside, from an institutional perspective, you can see the logic of saying, “The world is making it harder to be a Catholic, so let’s make it easier to practice the faith.”
[…]
[But] [f]or most people, Catholic faith isn’t an idea you’ve chosen that then has corollaries in practice (like “Get to Mass on Sunday”). It’s an inheritance that you get handed and have to decide what to do with. And the foundational problem with the keep-people-Catholic-by-making-it-easier-to-be-Catholic approach, it turns out, is that it removes too many of the signals indicating that this part of your inheritance is important — essential — rather than something you can keep without really investing in it, for yourself or, when the time comes, for your kids.
From this perspective, a key obstacle to getting modern Catholics to actually practice their inherited Catholicism isn’t whether they disagree with church teachings or feel adequately welcomed (as much as those issues matter). It’s that the church is in competition with a million other urgent-seeming things, and in its post-Vatican II form it has often failed to establish the importance of its own rituals and obligations.
For example, my guess would be that more American Catholics skip Mass because of the demands of youth sports, the felt need for a more relaxed family time or the competing pulls of work and entertainment than because of any theological or moral issue. And over time, this pattern compounds: The children of those families become couples who don’t bother to marry in the church and parents who don’t baptize their kids, and so decline continues because of cultural priorities rather than beliefs.
My entire life and priesthood is dedicated to trying to stem the greatest apostasy since the Reformation, and I know (based on the profound, shared heartbreak of kids leaving the faith that I hear about every day) that most of our parishioners share my heart on this. So I am open to any conversation that helps us better understand the underlying problem, even if that means asking hard questions about 60-years’ worth of priorities, assumptions, and efforts.
No conclusions today. Just another column inviting you into my questions. 😉
Fr. Moore 