The Changing Landscape: Part II

When we last talked about the changing landscape of the Church, we talked about how a lot of the things that mattered before really don't matter as much now to people.  We should also consider that on some issues, there's been a genuine change of belief among people, and the benefits this could potentially have to traditionalists.

When we talk about these changes, we aren't really talking about doctrine.  For better or worse, people's opinions on doctrine are pretty set in stone.  In the Church of public opinion, Catholics in the West favor, by a pretty wide margin, changing the doctrine of the Church, in ways Pope Francis supports (communion for the divorced and remarried), and ways he absolutely does not.  (Women's ordination, a Church where decisions are made according to democratic vote, etc.)  So when we talk about the changes, we are talking about people's changing belief in how Catholicism is meant to work.

Since the pontificate of John Paul II (and in more embryonic stage before that throughout the 20th century), the Catholic Church, to the extent it has "worked", worked in a very top-down way of understanding.  The Pope was the "Gold Standard" of Catholicism.  He wasn't just Christ's vicar by virtue of office, he was the image of Jesus Christ on earth in the minds of many.  Asking if something was "Catholic" or "the right thing for Catholics to do" simply meant pointing to whatever the Pope was doing.  Or, as one writer put it in 2014 (a viewpoint she no doubt rejects today), it is our job as Lay Catholics to "be the kind of Catholic Pope Francis needs us to be."

Combined with this spirit was a belief (at least in theory) that it was the Pope's job to handle every matter of the Church.  Bishop's lost their identity as successors of the Apostles, and were transformed into the yes-men.  So a Bishop was measured by how in line he was with whoever the occupant of the Holy See was.    The lasting impact of a Pope came to be understood in how many Cardinals he selected, so that those cardinals in the future would become pope and carry out that pope's agenda.

That way of thinking is crumbling.  For better or worse, Pope Francis is no longer looked to as the ideal Catholic by a growing amount of the Church.  Bishops have recovered a bit of the backbone they have given up over the years in a variety of ways.  (But only a bit, as the McCarrick affair showed.)  While he may or may not be able to decide his successor, Cardinals are forming into camps not based  upon the pope that appointed them, but other factors. (Region, ideology, etc.)

This is different than Vatican II simply no longer being relevant.  To a growing number of Catholics, they reject the understanding of Catholicism that was the consensus understanding from roughly 1979-2013.  This is an opportunity for traditionalists to present an alternative, one not based upon a stale and dead consensus represented by a pope in his mid 80's barely listened to by anyone, and certainly esteemed by even fewer.  We have that advantage precisely because we aren't bound by thinking that everything about Catholicism has to be understood solely through the prism of 1965 and later.  The way out of the current crisis doesn't exist in the mind of the present pope, and likely doesn't exist in the mind of either his successor or his successor's successor.  The solution will likely come from outside the Vatican.  Yet today's Catholicism cannot conceive of a Catholicism that isn't solely understood through the texts of the current pope, and maybe his immediate predecessors.  That puts us at a natural advantage.