What the Church needs now more than anything is unity. And not a fake unity grounded in a false irenicism or a milquetoast Catholicism of some imagined golden mean between ideological extremes. What this will require is theological sobriety, prudential wisdom, and a brutal honesty about what the Church is really up against in the cultural currents of our time. Negatively, what this will entail is an end to what I call the “fantasy camp” thinking of the Catholic progressive Left and the radical traditionalist Right. It will entail an end to the ideological tail wagging the ecclesial dog as various factions within the Church fight for their favored agendas.
What is required, therefore, is the serious work of serious theologians and serious prelates doing the hard thing—the only real hard thing—of placing the Council and its checkered reforms in a proper theological hermeneutic that the magisterium will use to generate a true unity of faith going forward.
But this will also require that the Church combat the many siloed and balkanized forms of narrative discourse that have emerged via the internet and social media. In particular, as mentioned above, the progressive and traditionalist counter-narratives to that of the magisterium of the Church will have to be confronted and shown to be the fractious realities, grounded in fantasy thinking, that they are.
I will mainly concern myself in what follows with the traditionalist narrative since the SSPX situation is currently making waves, and I have already dealt with the progressive wing of the Church in various publications. But this asymmetry of analysis should in no way be construed as not caring about the challenges posed by that wing of the Church, and the conclusions I reach at the end, as I make clear, apply equally as well to progressives as to the traditionalists.
One of the standard narratives deeply embedded within the radical traditionalist wing of Catholicism is that the Church is, as one prominent traditionalist recently put it in a social media post, in an “unprecedented freefall.” There is, of course, no denying the sobering statistics of how many Catholics have left the practice of the faith in the West over the past decades. Even the staunchest defenders of the current ecclesial status quo have to admit that the Church has lost millions of adherents in the West. But the deeper and really important question is why?
The self-identified “traditionalists” have their answer to that question and it is what one might expect. It is the very superficiality and simplicity of the analysis that gives it cogency in certain circles. The culprit, they claim, is this ill-defined thing called “modernism,” which has infiltrated the Church and given us the disastrous “ambiguities” of Vatican II, followed by the wretched, “Protestantized” reformed liturgy of Paul VI, the spectacle of a runaway religious relativism, and a general ignorance of Catholic doctrine amongst the vast majority of the faithful. That is quite a list.
And by “modernism” they do not mean the very specific set of errors set out brilliantly and condemned by Pope Pius X in his underrated encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Errors that involved treating the central dogmas of the faith as the fungible expressions of an underlying and ever-changing cultural reality and a nebulous notion of our subjective religious sense as the foundational reality that grounds all doctrinal formulations. Whether or not the problem was as pervasive as Pius X thought is irrelevant for our purposes. The ideas he condemned deserved condemning and he was quite specific as to what they were.
By contrast, what traditionalists mean by “modernism” is far broader and seems to mean “anything that is modern” in any sense at all and which they tend to dislike. They seem to have no issue at all with modern realities like traditionalist celebrity airport bishops or Trad catechesis via the internet. But a pope approves of communion in the hand? Modernism! Altar girls? Modernism! Religious freedom in civil society? Modernism! And regardless of what one thinks of the pastoral wisdom behind those realities, the fact is that this is not what Pius X meant by modernism in any strict sense. They are simply developments within the Church that the traditionalists do not like, among many other developments, and which they therefore label, dismissively, as modernism.
This linguistic legerdemain is central to the traditionalist project because it allows them to treat everything in the modern Church they disapprove of as examples of the kind of heretical trends identified, allegedly, by Pius X. This is a key rhetorical move since part and parcel to this narrative of modernist infiltration is the further claim that, when one compares the Church of today with the preconciliar Church, one can see clearly the superiority of the latter over the former. The preconciliar Church, they allege, was not modernist. The postconciliar Church is. QED. Case closed.
Therefore, what we need now, they claim, is for a future pope or council to roll back and/or correct what are admittedly the merely “pastoral” teachings of the Council, to suppress the Mass of Pope Paul VI and return us to the Mass of Pope Paul V, to condemn the modernist theologians, up to and including the ressourcement/Communio theologians, and to restore Thomistic neo-scholastic thinkers like Garrigou-Lagrange as the standard theologians of the Church.
Of course, all of this relies upon a romanticized historical revisionism that evinces a “We are the holy remnant” way of thinking. But their romanticization of the Baroque form of Catholicism, and their near idolatrous fetishization of the vetus ordo above the authority of the pope himself, renders their “holy remnant” cast of mind an exercise in question begging. Because one must immediately ask, the “holy remnant” of what, exactly? It was precisely the preconciliar form of Catholicism that they so lionize that was so fragile that it collapsed almost overnight after the Council. So what exactly is it that they are seeking to preserve?
And of course, this does not even touch upon the deeper theological question of how one manages the contradiction involved in denouncing an entire ecumenical council, and all post-conciliar popes, as infected with modernism, all the while upholding the doctrine of the indefectibility of the Church. They essentialize their own private interpretation of what constitutes “the tradition” and appeal to its binding normativity on the grounds of the Church’s indefectibility, but then go on to assert that the modern magisterium is quite defectible indeed.
They attempt an end run around this theological contradiction by pointing out that none of the things to which they object represent infallible teachings and, therefore, they are allowed to dissent from them and to consider them to be in grave error. And if one objects that this calls into question the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the high authority of the ordinary magisterium of an ecumenical council and of numerous post-conciliar encyclicals, they accuse their accusers of being “ultramontanists” who have succumbed to “the spirit of Vatican I.”
But this is a strange and novel permutation of the Church’s long standing—dare I say “traditional” —construal of how her magisterial authority works and the level of obedience owed to it.
Likewise, the SSPX subterfuge of claiming that a “situation of grave necessity” justifies their schismatic actions is an incoherent form of self-justification that also falls on its own sword. For they themselves, through their fifty year-long ecclesial rebellion, are part and parcel of, and key players in, the very crisis they decry. In other words, absent their dissent, is it really true that we do not have a magisterially approved interpretation of the Council? Is it not therefore also true that their very rejection of the magisterial interpretation is a direct contributing factor to what they themselves allege is an ongoing situation of interpretive confusion?
In fact, does their rebellion not constitute a rejection of why we have a magisterium in the first place? It is precisely in order to combat those within the Church who seek to sunder her unity via claims of interpretive privilege for their own hobby horses.
But beyond that basic observation, it is also true that their actions expose the latent pathologies that were already present in the alternative, preconciliar Church they propose—pathologies that led directly to the collapse of Church praxis, which had already begun before the Council. For example, the desire for a “pure” form of Catholicism that is contra mundum in everything deemed modern (and without the slightest nod toward the logoi spermatikoi contained within modernity or the “spoils of Egypt” motif so common amongst the Church Fathers) was all too common before the Council. “Purity” demanded a fortress of solitude Catholicism, a pure dialectic of rejection with no analogical points of contact with the good things that do in fact exist in the modern world.
Along these same lines, this need for an impregnable fortress of Catholic purity required the strong arm of magisterial censure that brought unnecessary misery to thinkers like de Lubac, and which placed a pall of suspicion over her best and brightest theologians of that time as little more than the questionable purveyors of a pernicious “new theology.” The modern world did indeed present the Church with a set of unprecedented challenges. Perhaps, and I am of this mindset, the greatest set of challenges she had ever faced. All the more reason, then, to not treat her most profound theological thinkers—thinkers who were attempting to grapple seriously with the new challenge—with a crippling and stifling suspicion.
In this regard, there is a stale and anodyne quality to the modern traditionalist call for a restorationist project. They posture as some kind of radical movement, or as brave recusants hosting TLM’s in a hidden room in the basement, or as revolutionary resisters tilting at the windmill of “ultrapapalist” modernist tyranny. In reality they are as dull as dull gets insofar as their proposals don’t even have the charm of something creatively expressive of an Avante-garde and mostly harmless alternative. There is instead a David Byrne “same as it ever was” tonality to it all, insofar as most of their agitations call for a shopworn return to a doctrinal and liturgical “purity” to be imposed from above by a future restorationist pope. As such it is little more than a recipe for a Groundhog Day level of dull repetition. I call it the Pascendi Pantocrator approach: A Pius X type pope will emerge but this time, he will be really angry. This time he will mean it.
This kind of traditionalism is dull precisely because it lacks the imaginative capacity that actually engages the world in which we live. It is not at all an attempt to embrace the conciliar christological project of theosis via kenosis, wherein all doctrines, all ecclesial disciplines, and all moral theological teachings are treated as the footmen of Christ’s carriage of trinitarian transformative redemption.
In many ways the traditionalist narrative involves a “gaming” of Catholicism, insofar as the stated aim of getting the Church to, at the very least, “set aside” the Council and its reforms as a pastoral mistake, cannot be taken as a serious proposal. And this lack of seriousness is compounded by the further aim of getting the Church to hit a giant reset button and to restore the old order in full form. This is a proposal that is lacking in any real prospect of success and is therefore a form of fantasy thinking.
Some might say I am attacking a straw man and that no “reasonable” traditionalist espouses such views. The SSPX most certainly does espouse such views and, judging by the public sympathy for the SSPX expressed by many mainstream traditionalist influencers, there is a strong current of this kind of fantastical thinking coursing through the movement. In many ways, therefore, those traditionalists who think this way are no different from the liberal Catholics who have “held on” in subterranean ways waiting for the “right pope” to emerge who will vindicate them and put their proposals into action.
The liberal faction thought that they had such a pope in Francis. And despite his mercurial and often hard to decipher papacy, there is one clear fact that can be affirmed: They did not get what they wanted. Not even the “liberal” Pope Francis gave them the fulfillment of their fantasy camp wish list of changes to doctrine and praxis. We still have mandatory celibacy for priests and religious, and marriage that is life long, monogamous, and between a man and a woman. We got no changes in the teaching on contraception or moral theology in general, or to the issue of women’s ordination, even to the diaconate, nor any changes to the fundamentally apostolic and hierarchical nature of the Church, despite a push for it through a particular understanding “synodality.” When interviewed on American television and asked if women might someday be ordained, Francis said, bluntly and with finality, “No.”
At most, Francis “tweaked” some of these issues—sometimes ambiguously—but always stopping short of changing the substance of any major teaching of the Church. The only real change was to the teaching on the death penalty, but that is hardly one of the central, barn-burner topics that so agitate the fantasy wings of the Church.
And neither will Pope Leo be the pope to grant liberals their fantasy camp Church of endless changes. By all indications his goal is precisely what I started with: The unity of the Church. And his goal is not unity for the sake of unity, but unity for the sake of the Church’s reality as the saving presence of Christ in the world and for the sake of the world’s salvation.
Therefore, I think it is of great significance that two of his emphases during the first year of his pontificate were his renewed catechesis on Vatican II—a catechesis that draws heavily from his predecessors—and his encyclical on artificial intelligence. What this shows is that he is not about to cede the high ground to the forces of lazy fractiousness. Rather, he seeks to once again take up the task of serious deliberation and to do the “hard thing,” which is to grab the ecclesial bull by the horns and steer it in a proper hermeneutical and theological direction.
All schisms are serious. But in his recent moves with regard to the status of the SSPX, he has, in essence, declared their concerns to be a sideshow act. Nor will he grant legitimacy, as we have already seen, to the ridiculous requests of the Germans. Which is yet another sideshow destined for irrelevance.
We need to pray for him and for this project of papal unification of the Church. That is what popes, after all, are for. To steer us away from fantasy and into the light of the crucified and risen Lord, who alone is truth and of whom he is the Vicar on earth.
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22. Read Larry’s other WWNN essays.
Larry Chapp is at it again with his strawman assumptions about those he avoids understanding. He displays support for an assumed reasonable middle ground fidelity, while denying this is what he is doing, based on his own fantasies of the efficacy of social management.
He contends that "what traditionalists mean by “modernism” is far broader and seems to mean “anything that is modern”. This is incredibly foolish. No, modernism means what the Church has always said it means, submission to secular understandings of the human condition that deny immutable objective truth. Only a denial process would insist that relativism hasn't been the central project of spirit of Vatican II Catholics, including prelates. And apparently modernism apologists like Chapp are unaware that unity among all of God's sinful perpetually deluded children is not only evil, it is an impossibility, just as Jesus said it was.
OUTSTANDING!