Opinion – Ross Douthat: Second Vatican Council failed Catholics and Catholicism

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A few years ago, at a party, I had a conversation with a nice older gentleman, an Irish-American baby boomer from the northeastern part of the United States. At some point, the conversation turned to family life and the challenges of dragging complaining children into church, and I said something in passing about the Sunday obligation, that is, the requirement imposed on Catholics to attend Mass under pain of sin. serious.

He looked at me with a kind of friendly bewilderment. “Oh,” he said, “but do you know that the Church got rid of it after the Second Vatican Council?”

I didn’t really argue with him. Catholicism was deep in his bones, he had been educated by nuns one day, who was I to tell him what his faith really teaches?

But I find this meeting, and others like it, intensely relevant to my column a few weeks ago — on the failure of the Second Vatican Council to equip the Church for the challenges of late modernity, the way its reforms aimed at resilience, but in instead, they led to crisis and deterioration.

What I tried to emphasize there, with some references to the work of the French historian Guillaume Cuchet, was that the problem of the Second Vatican Council was probably not some specific change or controversy that followed—whether it was about religious freedom, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, or the moral position of artificial birth control. Instead, it was the sheer scale of the changes, the evisceration of an entire “culture of obligatory practice” (Cuchet’s phrase), that severed many of the threads connecting people to the faith, undermined confidence that the Church really knew what it was. was doing and made people more relaxed about the obligations that remained officially.

The question of going to mass on Sundays is a good example. Technically, the Church never said what my friendly interlocutor believed, never suspended the weekly obligation. But when a number of customs that enforced this obligation were relaxed, from the requirement to fast before Mass to the emphasis on regular confession, the unspoken message was what he received — that the time of strict rules was over, that henceforth the Church would be defined by a more… American kind of flexibility.

The idea was not simply to facilitate Catholicism, of course; there was hope that a truer Christianity would flourish when mechanical obedience waned. But policies and results, not hopes, are what should interest us three generations later.

And by itself, a policy of lightening the burdens was hardly a crazy idea of ​​how the Church could adapt to modernity and keep Catholics in the pews. Spiritual issues aside, from an institutional perspective, one can see the logic of saying that the world is making it difficult to be Catholic, so let’s make it easier to practice the faith.

In fact, I will say that the relaxed style of the contemporary Church offers useful concessions to my own situation as a busy professional juggling a variety of secular obligations. But I’m also an unusual case: a teenage convert and the son of a convert, an over-intellectual believer, a little weird in my mixture of laxity and literalism.

For most people, the Catholic faith is not an idea you have chosen that has practical corollaries (like going to Mass on Sunday). It’s an inheritance you receive and you have to decide what to do with it.

From this perspective, a fundamental obstacle to modern Catholics actually practicing their inherited Catholicism is not whether they disagree with Church teachings or feel adequately welcome (as much as these issues matter). It is that the Church is in competition with a million other things that seem urgent, and in its post-Second Vatican Council 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 miss Mass because of the demands of youth sports, the felt need for more relaxed “family time,” or the competitive attractions of work and leisure than for any theological or moral reasons. And over time this pattern strengthens: the children of these families become couples who don’t bother to marry in church and parents who don’t baptize their children, and so the decline continues because of cultural priorities, not beliefs.

At the moment, the Catholic hierarchy is engaged in the so-called synod on synodality, a series of listening sessions and bureaucratic confabulations aimed at making the Church more welcoming and inclusive — with a strong suspicion from conservatives that the endgame will be more liberalizations of doctrine. religious.

I’m one of those wary conservatives, but I think the analysis of the Second Vatican Council I’m offering here points to a slightly different set of questions for liberal Catholics who are having their moment under Pope Francis.

That is, which of his reforms would make the Church seem more important to the semicaid? How do you reach someone who doesn’t feel unwelcome at Mass, but also doesn’t feel any kind of urge to participate? If progressive Catholicism is busy suspending what it sees as non-essential obligations, rushing towards a possible future where one doesn’t even have to be Catholic to receive communion in the Catholic Church, what form of obligation can it instill?

Liberalizers do not believe that a return to tradition is sufficient for the current challenge. Very good; as a non-traditionalist in my personal practice, I am evidence for their point of view. But what is the new means, the 21st-century welcoming and affirmative mechanism, by which my party friend, the ancestral Catholic, can be convinced that it really matters if he goes to Sunday Mass?

Any potential recovery of Catholic vitality on the model of Pope Francis, any future in which the Second Vatican Council revolution is somehow justified, depends above all on the answer to that question.

I admit that Roman Catholicism is not “unknown” in the present age. But in the European region of Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, an important Francis ally and possible successor (he is the Archbishop of Luxembourg), it is already a “small sect” by past standards: some reports put Mass attendance among who identify as Catholic in Germany at about 9%, and about 5% among Dutch and French Catholics, all part of a sharp multigenerational decline.

For a more detailed and less implausible argument, I recommend a wire on twitter from David Gibson, director of the Center for Religion and Culture at Fordham University, responding to my column. His strongest argument is about the post-Second Vatican Council vitality of Catholicism outside the West. This vitality is particularly visible in Sub-Saharan Africa, where Catholicism has grown dramatically as the continent’s population has grown, without the drastic decline seen elsewhere.

But the exception is Africa, not, as Gibson suggests, a general “global South” that what he calls my “parochial” American perspective ignores. Yes, it is likely that demographic momentum has driven Catholic growth forward in some parts of the world, even as the sharp decline began in the West, but patterns in Latin America today are similar to American and European, except with more losses to Pentecostalism. and evangelism. (Just between 2010 and 2020, in the pope’s Argentina, the share of Catholics rose from 76% to 49% of the population.) The post-1960s collapse is worse in Western Europe, but the failure of renewal is evident almost everywhere where Catholicism was well established before the council.

So Gibson’s other points are less convincing: he accuses me of not having “a sense of history” for failing to recognize that the challenges facing the Church go deeper than the council. But my column explicitly stated that some version of the Second Vatican Council was necessary, that its unfortunate failure does not prove that the church could have continued as it was without facing some sort of crisis, some shock, or some decline.

He invokes the chaos that followed previous councils to say that, in my view, many would have to be “regarded as failures,” and yes, I think some of them were. Does anyone believe, for example, that the Fifth Lateran Council in 1512-17 needs to be considered a great work of the Holy Spirit, when it clearly failed to do anything useful to stop the Protestant Reformation, which began the year it ended? Even the Council of Trent clearly failed in some of its aims, as it did not reconcile the Lutherans or re-Catholicize Northern Europe or prevent the Thirty Years’ War.

Ultimately, the business of the Catholic Church is to save souls, serve Jesus Christ, and manifest God’s presence through its holiness and beauty. And, as I said in the column and I repeat it, what generates cynicism is when the Church behaves like the Soviet Empire in its old age and demands constant praise for the wisdom and success of a renovation project that is already decades old, when all can see clearly that is presiding over crisis and decline.

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