Humanae Vitae and the End of the Devotional Papacy

 As mentioned in the previous installment, the papacy during the time from 1860 to 1960 was a carefully managed play where Popes had theoretically great power, but that power was very limited in the wider world.  Within the Church, this power was viewed to be supreme, and the papacy came to be viewed as less in terms of governance and more in terms of devotional spirituality.  Yet behind this wall of devotion, Popes attempt to manipulate the levers of power as best they could.

With a diminution in temporal power, the Popes attempted to increase their centralized power within the Church.  It was within this timeframe that the Pope began to claim (if you believe Eamon Duffy, then out of nowhere) the right to centralize episcopal appointments entirely within Rome within the Latin Church.  Every step of the way was now guided by Rome.  There was a genuine fear (sometimes with ample reason) that, without meaningful temporal power, there was little to stop a rogue Bishop from doing what he wanted.  So an arrangement that was once understood (No Bishop can reign in his sea with the opposition of the Roman Pontiff) was transformed into a far more interventionist practice where the Holy See chose the Bishops as an extra step to help ensure their loyalty.

If you're expecting me to say this system was bad and an utter failure, I think that's a bit harsh.  For better or worse, the Church navigated some very trying times (including two world wars), and she managed to survive.  Her missionary impulse was rekindled in the early to mid 20th century, especially in Africa.  The Church's general separation from the European powers probably helped her to continue to grow and thrive, even after the decolonization movements in the mid 20th century.  What I want to do instead is look at this not in terms of success and failure, but in strengths and weakness.

One area of particular weakness is the papacy had developed a serious Oz complex.  Once you got past the majesty and mystique of the thundering voice and peaked behind the curtain, the pope was a lot weaker than advertised.  While everyone expected bishops to just do whatever the pope said, what would happen if they didn't?  It was something that was impossible to the modern mind, since over a century of devotional teaching had ruled out such a possibility, despite the very obvious fact this happened again and again throughout Church history.  If modern man had outgrown the superstitions of ancient religion, the modern Churchman, through the current understanding of hierarchical power, had overcome the divisions of the past.

Or did it?

At this point we are going to address the 800 lb gorilla in every traditionalist polemic, the Second Vatican Council.  I do so only because I am forced to. For our purposes, the Second Vatican Council (whatever your thoughts on it) was a time of immense change in the Church, and with that immense change came an expansion of possibilities within the minds of its thinkers and rulers.  It is in this context I want you to understand the significance of July 25th, 1968, the authoring of the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae.

As everyone knows (for reasons that will be spelled out later), Humanae Vitae was an encyclical that reiterated previous denunciations of artificial contraception.  There was a widespread belief (in tune with the expanded possibilities of the times) the Catholic Church would follow the lead of the Anglicans and other Protestants in softening their opposition to birth control. In some more radical circles, it was believed the Church could approve birth control.  Paul VI emphatically rejected this, and made a bold case for the blessing of children, even seeming to grant the idea that the Earth had a population problem.

To say the encyclical was controversial is an understatement.  Yet, to any student of history, this was not the first time that the laity or even Bishops had not received Church teaching.  (If anything, encyclicals of Popes to Bishops throughout history can be summarized as "Would you please remember to implement X or Y, which we have magnanimously committed to your pastoral care on numerous occasions?")  What made this dissent different was it occurred after a century of the Devotional Papacy, where the spiritual importance of the papacy had never been higher, and their practical authority never lower.  To draw from that great thinker Gorilla Monsoon, we were about to see what happens when the unstoppable force met the immoveable object.

Dissent from Humanae Vitae was immediate and widespread.  While much attention is paid to the Winnepeg Statement, bishops conferences all across Europe ignored or outright resisted Paul VI's encyclical.  Within 2 years, it was clear not only that Paul VI had many detractors... he had few allies among the episcopate who was going to enforce his will.  Sixty years of carefully appointing loyalists to episcopal sees meant nothing.  Not only were they opposing the pope, it became pretty clear there was very little Paul VI could do about it.  Was he going to excommunicate entire episcopal bodies?  Contraception was popular among the laity in the West.  Faced with this immense weakness, the Pope sank into a general melancholy for the remainder of his pontificate.  Once everyone realized it was possible to dissent from the Pope, that dissent went into overdrive.  The Pope lamented his weak governance, but I think we should be realistic in that there was very little he could have done.  The options on the table were catastrophic, so he did what could be reasonably expected:  he did nothing.  That doing nothing includes not admitting defeat.  The gates of hell didn't prevail, the Church remained true to her doctrinal fidelity, but at what cost?  Her very understanding of how authority works was shattered?  What replaced it?

What replaced it could be generally described as anarchy.

Eras of the Modern Church: The Devotional Papacy

 A staple of discourse in modern Catholicism surrounds the Second Vatican Council, and its rammifications for the Church as a whole.  While this is an interesting debate, there are other ways to understand the Church.  The Council can intersect with these, but I think its possible to talk about the crisis in the Church as an overall crisis of the Church encountering the age of Liberalism, of which Vatican II is one part of that discussion.

When I say the Age of Liberalism, I'm taking a wider view of history here.  I think the age of Liberalism describes an era in which, in the secular world, nations replaced dynasties (or dynasties were reduced and subjected to nations.)  This process began in the 1600s, and by the end of the 19th century one could credibly say that most of Europe were ruled by liberal (even if of a conservative bent) regimes, a big exception being Russia.   These nation states were governed by constitutions, some giving the King/executive a lot of power, others resting it primarily in parliament/legislatures.  They all seemed to agree that one place political power should not reside was within the Catholic Church.

This transformation would have posed a real problem to the power of the Church even under ideal circumstances.  Yet after 1789 and the French Revolution, it was most certainly not ideal circumstances.  The Jacobin terror gave way to a very centralized powerful French Empire that spawned across Europe, and even if he had no desire to destroy the Church, Napoleon had no interest in the Church retaining her preeminent role in politics she once had in European Society.

If this sounds like a time of a disaster for the Church, that's only partially true.  Contrary to popular belief, religious practice flourished within Europe during this time.  Yet as Christopher Clark pointed out in his new book Revolutionary Spring (a look at Europe during this age through the prism of 1848 revolutions), it was a revival of religious sentiment that hierarchies (in both Catholicism and Protestantism) had very little control over.  Having lost the ability to define the boundaries of religious expression with her diminution of political power, Christian expression began to express itself in new ways, and a lot of them pretty contrary to not just Catholic practice, but the very notion of a Christianity rooted in divine revelation.

It is within this context we introduce everyone's favorite boogeyman:  the Ultramontanists.  (Literally "over the mountain" As an example of a religious expression that had very little control by Church authorities, ultramontanism looked at the sad and pathetic state of episcopal power in the local Church, and sought refuge in a highly idyllic Roman papacy as the remedy.  These were orthodox Catholics, in a time of revival, trying to find some suitable vehicle to oppose the growing marginalization of the Church.  The Papacy was a convenient plot device for this end:  an ancient venerable institution with a ton of spiritual power and prestige, but very little practical ability to do anything.

At this point the papacy became a devotional tool:  holiness became identified by ones expression of the Pope.  The debate about Gallicianism and concilliarism (whether or not state sponsored councils were superior to the authority of the Pope) was mostly a devotional show:  liberals were interested in marginalizing/persecuting religion, but not controlling it.  (This would change in the 20th century with the rise of Bolshevism)

None of this is to say that the Pope's authority is false, papal infallibility is wrong, etc.  It is to say that, ultramontanism, whatever else it believed, was mostly a play:  it was easy to talk up the authority of the pope in an era where the pope could not realistically be expected to do anything in your backyard.  This ultramontane spirit permeated a lot of the discussion at the First Vatican Council (and afterwards, especially in the anti-clerical France of the Third Republic)

Over the years after the Council, this devotional papacy skyrocketed in appeal, as papal authority continued to be limited in the secular world, anti-clericalism became a thing in liberal regimes, and the Church had (to her credit) 2 popes who reigned a combined 60+ years in Pius IX and Leo XIII, genuinely impressive popes who did a pretty good job navigating the Church through a relatively impossible situation.  Yet for all the talk of ultramontanism and papal supremacy during this era, the Popes were very careful about the battles they chose.  Most of the authority of the papacy rested in its existence over nearly two millennia.  Yet there was always a worry that if push came to shove, the papacy, full of power, might be limited in how it responds.

One might think that, with this description, I have a very hostile view of ultramontanism and of the Popes who benefitted greatly from it.  That isn't the case at all.  As mentioned before, ultramontanists were, by and large, orthodox Catholics trying to navigate an incredibly tough era.  They fought against the complete subjection of the Church to the State, and were a useful reminder to Catholics to not become too caught up in the spirit or ideologies of the age.  We can say all these things while still understanding their position was fundamentally one of weakness, and its defensive nature meant it was never going to really be able to effectively define how it was supposed to operate in the real world, as operating in the real world was never a serious possibility. 

Yet what is undeniable is that the devotional understanding of the papacy owes a lot to ultramontanism.  What happens when there is a decisive battle, where the pope's ultimate authority is tested?  What happens if he loses that battle?  The Devotional Papacy came crashing down in the 1960's, capped by the crisis which took a sledgehammer to it:  Humanae Vitae.  That's what we'll cover next.

Chartres and the Failure of Liberal Catholicism

This past weekend in France, there was an annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, something that has always been a key unifying moment in the life of traditionalists.  Whatever our differences, we tend to put our differences aside and show a united front to the world once a year with that pilgrimage.  This year we saw a particularly strong showing, with more than 20,000 pilgrims registered.  Fearing a logistical breakdown, registrations were actually halted once 20,000 was reached.  Here we are, two years in Tradiotnis Custodes.  We are a decade into Francis telling anyone with ears to hear those who love the Latin Mass are a cancer infecting the Church.  We are two years removed from the Pope telling individual priests they needed his permission on what they could put in parish bulletins, and when they were allowed to invite parishioners into the hall for coffee.  (That everyone has outright ignored the Pope on this insane and ridiculous micromanaging is something even his ardent defenders are normally quiet on.)  In spite of all this clear opposition and dedicated attempts at marginalization, why has the pilgrimage grown larger than ever?

A recent study conducted by La Croix magazine might shed some light.  (For those who do not wish to pay for access to a magazine often hostile to their interests, The Pillar's Luke Coppen offers a pretty good summary.)  The results are pretty unmistakable:  among French Catholics, there is a growing cadre of Catholics (a growing minority) for whom the TLM is either their preference, or they have strong sympathies towards it.  What they also find is that Catholics increasingly come from the political right, even if they are not entirely at home with it.  I think this quote from a sociologist captures the essence of what I want to talk about:

"It’s not Catholicism that’s tilting to the right,” argued sociologist Raison du Cleuziou, “but Catholicism on the right that’s perpetuating itself better than Catholicism on the left.”

If you spend enough time steeped in online trad discourse (please, don't), you will inevitably hear of something called "The Traddening."  The Traddening is this belief that generational forces are behind traditionalists, and that over time, traditionalism will be all that's left.  This argument began in mostly French traditionalism, and, in fairness, it is easy to see it:  within 50 years traditionalist ordinations will dwarf those ordained in the more contemporary Church if present trends continue.  Yet The Traddening is mostly nonsense.  It ties Catholicism strictly to the amount of ordinations, it overlooks the large morass of Catholics for who this stuff doesn't matter (but are perfectly orthodox), and it makes the dangerous assumption that the ideas that have raged in the Church for the last 50 years will be the center of discourse for the next 50, which is quite the assumption!  

Yet, like all falsehoods, there's some truth here. I think the quote above captures that truth.  For traditionalists, they are finding people receptive to their message, and it is a message that is mostly positive.  See the TLM, encounter Christ, find peace in our beautiful liturgy.  You might think there's a bunch of other nonsense we attach to that stuff, but its clear that message resonates.  What is the message of liberal Catholicism, as personified by the likes of Pope Francis, Arthur Roche, the idiots at Where Peter Is, etc?

At this point, you'll hear the inevitable complaining about the use of the term "liberal", so before we dive into this too much, let's work with our terms.  From 1970 to the present, our Church has aligned itself mostly around one big question:  What are we to think of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council?  The reforms have happened, and, traditionalist complaining notwithstanding, you aren't going to get a wholesale reversion to before the Council.  This debate was had with the liberals in the 1960s, and its a debate we lost.  Decisively. Even if such a return were possible, nobody currently with any semblance of governance in the Church knows what that era was.  To the extent we argue about the Council, we do so entirely from a post-concilliar mindset.

Within that mindset, there are two camps.  The first could be called the "conservative" position.  Vatican II reformed the liturgy, it reformed ecclesiology, it reformed ecumenism, and it reformed how the Church approached the modern world.  Some of this worked, some of it didn't, but what's done is done.  The Church consolidated her positions during the reigns of John Paul and Benedict, and now we need to move on from the Council, towards handling the big questions tackling the Church from modernity.  The Council was the realignment, now comes the engagement.

The second could be called the "liberal" position.  They looked at Vatican II as a down payment on a new Church.  Even if it kept her ancient doctrines, the point of Vatican II was to launch a perpetual revolution within the Church.  Her doctrines might remain, but the myriad of ever changing circumstances requires a constant updating of how we express those truths, and, more importantly, when we allow the hard experience of reality to dictate how strictly we implement what we learn from doctrine.  These individuals were dominant during the 1970s, but then had to strike a careful balance with conservative popes.

These are not the only positions within the Church, and within this there is an obvious spectrum.  Sometimes people are fluid with their alignment.  For example, I think you could argue Francis, for the first half of his pontificate, governed within that conservative consensus.  (Even if he might not have personally believed it.)  The last five years he has thrown in his lot with the liberal consensus.

This consensus has dominated Catholicism over the last 5 decades, even if most people carried on their faith ignorant of it.  Debates happened largely within those terms.  Yet this consensus began to change.  Its first casualty were conservatives.  The abuse crisis combined with the death of John Paul II mostly shattered this consensus.  (For Bishops, this consensus was identified by someone like Fabian Bruskewitz, who was a rock star of 90s and early 2000s Catholicism but mostly forgotten today in his old age.)  Political events like the Global Financial Crisis also played its role in making sure that coalition (influenced by politics as much as religion) wasn't coming back.  While that consensus is dead, the legacy of John Paul II (and Benedict) carries immense weight among many of the old devotees.

I am of the belief the liberal consensus was shattered in 2018... also largely the result of an abuse crisis.  Liberalism survived the years of John Paul II and Benedict, only to be tried and found wanting during the years of Francis, who they always viewed as one of their own, being the principal organizers of his rise to the throne.  Since 2018 the Church has been rocked by repeated abuse scandals across the world:  her ethics and governance has broken down in a series of financial scandals requiring the pope to almost wholesale rewrite Church law on these matters. (With decidedly mixed results.)  The debates over the German Synodal Way have shattered the old ideological cohesion, and she is left arguing over who is the author and manager of the perpetual revolution:  Rome, the local Bishops, or "the people"?

For those who viewed Vatican II as the down payment on the asset they currently possess, what is the message they offer to the Church?  What is the message of hope the Pontiff provides?  What are the talking points they present to the world?  The blunt answer is:  they don't have any.  In the last five years, the Church of Pope Francis has grown extremely insular.  They only speak to themselves.  Whether it is Traditionis Custodes, internal financial reform, DDF dubias about the Synodal Way, the defining battles are internal struggles.  Listen to the Pope's weekly homilies, and they are seldom about a message to the world, but more a message at how disappointed he is in the various factions and members of the Church.  His homilies are far less about proclaiming the Gospel and liberty to captives as it is about his airing of grievances.  (This past weekend, while 20,000 Catholics were packed on a pilgrimage about encountering Christ, Francis used his homily to complain about people who helped others convert to the faith but didn't live up to his standards of perfection.  This column writes itself.)

The Church in 50 years will not be a trad fantasy.  Yet the liberal project of the last 60 years is on life support, its defenders having so thoroughly lost the plot they are quickly becoming best friends with Irrelevance.  The Traddening implied a stable Church we would eventually take over.  What happens when an unstable Church collapses into anarchy?  We might find out soon enough.

Rolling Back the Stone: An Easter Reflection

 While most of you will be spending the Triduum in Church proclaiming the Resurrections, I will likely only be with you in Spirit.  A nasty case of Norovirus has swept through our family, leaving us either out of commission or still recovering.  It is still very much an open question if I will fee recovered enough to show up to Mass on the day seemingly all Catholics do.

Like Christmas (and sometimes Mothers Day), Easter is one of the days where people come to Church who otherwise seldom go.  Our homilies focus on the importance (rightly so) of welcoming those Catholics, and hopefully our welcome will plant a seed for something more later.  While a nice gesture, it also makes us feel good.  We are doing something positive, our actions might bring Christ to the lost.  Aren't we awesome?  Sometimes our vanity needs to be flattered, I get it.  

Yes, you can play a critical part in proclaiming the empty tomb to the Masses.  The Empty Tomb is the greatest "sign and wonder" one can see.  The reality of the empty tomb is that the most ironclad of laws in the universe (the permanence of death) is subject to an outside force. If Death itself must acknowledge a superior, in what way is that superior force limited?  All are subject to Death, and yet Death is subject to the Father.  In the Resurrection,  death becomes subject to the Son, and like all things, becomes the footstool of the King of the Universe.  For those who are stuck in sin or who feel the crushing weight of the laws of the universe, there is comfort in knowing there is something better.

When the pious women first encounter the empty tomb, they encounter an angel.  That angel has one mission:  to tell anyone who appears of what has happened.  

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel;  and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise.” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told this to the apostles; but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

 

What I'd like you to think about is:  what if those women did something different?  What if, instead of proclaiming Christ risen, they kept it their little secret?  What if they rolled the stone back?  What if we do the same?  I think the Church today spends a lot of energy rolling the stone back in place, her actions doing their best to hide the power of the Resurrection from the world.  It is for this reason she has been shrinking in so many places, and why her leaders are increasingly consumed by chaos and impotence.  This also explains why our walk with Christ is so full of complications, because we are exerting great influence to push that heavy boulder back into place, rather than  allowing it to remain rolled away, showing the fullness of emptiness.

Why would we do this?  A big reason is because the rolling away of the Stone is the ultimate gut check for our faith.  If the Empty Tomb is real, then Jesus Christ is real.  If Jesus Christ is real, then everything he said is true.  If everything he said is true, I have to amend my life.  I have to turn away from sin.  I have to take a lot of uncomfortable stands.  I have to use every ounce of my being and my power to wage war against sin and evil.  That sounds like a lot of work!  

If I'm a bishop or pope and I encounter sexual abuse, I must set aside my original priorities and do everything in my power to expel it.  I have to risk feeling the backlash of that corruption.    The light of Christ can expose some pretty nasty stuff.  Or.... I could just roll back the stone.  Out of sight, out of mind.  I can give speeches telling everyone how we are in a New Springtime, how the real enemy is this or that group, and how spotless the Church is even if she has sinners.  I can talk about those aspects of the faith which are more agreeable to me instead.  Even better, I can complain about the faults of others.

We might also read those words at the end of the Gospel passage above:  "but these words seemed to them an idle tale" and draw our own conclusions from that.  Why waste time proclaiming this?  Certainly everyone will think its nonsense.  If we spend a little too much time thinking about them, we might even conclude of course they will dismiss it as a pious fable:   have you seen THEM?  Look at what they believe!  Look at how they are trapped in sin, whether moral failures, heresy, or rigidity! Look at the way they worship!  C'mon man, are these people really worthy of this message?  So let's roll the stone back.  Don't worry, when the right people come along we will tell them the truth.   You know, those who act like me.  THEY WILL BELIEVE.  

In a vacuum, and in a worldly manner, you can rationalize all of this behavior as not only understandable, but good.  Why cast pearls before swine?  Why let the light that left the empty tomb uncover a lot of rotten things, in myself and the Church at large?  What good will that do? The Resurrection is the greatest gift God gave to the Church, let's protect its sanctity!   All of these things might be true, but they represent something fundamentally opposed to the Resurrection: an attempt to control God's power.  The gift of the Resurrection was meant to be shared with the world.  It is not the possession of the Church, but something she is given in a sacred trust, to deliver to its intended audience:  all of mankind.  To keep that gift to ourselves is to strip it of any meaning.

So think about that this Easter.  Think of how everyone in the Church, from the Pope in Rome, your patriarch, to you, have exerted great energy to rob God's greatest gift of meaning 364 days a year.  Or.... hey, just think of how awesome you are welcoming people  on that one day a year.

What is Vatican II's Relevance Today?

 In our journey of faith, we all have these moments which to the outside observer seem weird and inconsequential, but for us are eye opening.  It is one of the ways in which God speaks to us as one who is known by name.  Different things are tailored to different people. I'd like to share a brief story which I hope will become more  apparent by the end.

The year is 2012.   The parish is Assumption Grotto in Detroit, Michigan.  Due to some unfortunate local Church politics (known by residents of the Detroit scene and interesting to them only), your not so humble correspondent had relocated parishes, and was attending the TLM at Assumption Grotto.  The Grotto had the reputation of being the "diehard" trad parish in the Archdiocese.  If you weren't SSPX, you were Grotto.  That's where the realest of the real trads hung out, because they were viewed as a TLM parish that offered the Novus Ordo on the side.  (Wasn't true but anyways!)  

Cognizant of this reputation, the pastoral team at the Grotto decided to spend the year educating the congregation about the documents of Vatican II, and why they were capable of being read in harmony with tradition.  For about 5-10 minutes each homily, they'd take a section from a document and talk about it, and then go into the regular homily.  Within 5 months the program was dead, yet not for the reasons you'd think. Most would think that the congregation rebelled against the idea Vatican II could be harmonized.  Instead, the opposite happened.  Most of the congregation was willing to concede the documents could be read in line with tradition.  They just..... did not care.  A majority of the several hundred parishioners were below the age of 40, and grew up during the pontificate of John Paul II.  Vatican II had zero salience for their daily Christian lives.  The pastors might as well have given their homilies in Greek, and they might have made more of an impact just for the curiosity of it all.

These results did not surprise me, but they did make me start paying a lot more attention to it.   A year or so later, I wrote "Closing the Door on Vatican II", in which I said the following:

A lot of this is new territory that appeals to Vatican II cannot directly answer.  While we might not need a Third Vatican Council, we can no longer treat the Council as some “Super-Council” from which a new Church is built.  Rather, Vatican II must join the 20 other Ecumenical Councils which had orthodox teaching when it specifically dealt with doctrine (read in line with tradition), some good ideas for reform, and others that were best left either untried or jettisoned.

This landscape isn’t perfect, but it is a landscape far more favorable to traditionalists (especially here in America) then what existed before.  Within this framework we can put forth our principles as the ones which will best bring about the reform of the Church we all desperately seek.  It is also a harder terrain for those who are active foes of traditionalists.  Their goal has been to marginalize the movement by impugning heretical thoughts and “quasi-schismatic” motives and intentions to traditionalist concerns.  This is not the landscape of the generations immediately before us, and for that we should be eternally grateful.  This is not only a terrain we can fight on, this is a terrain we can win real victories on.

Years later, I wrote "Vatican II and the Case for Not Caring" in which I said the following:

Finally, Barron and Vigano are debating attitudes about Vatican II. They are not debating teachings. Barron doesn’t mention a specific teaching that is rejected that Vigano is required to accept. Vigano is not calling on Catholics to reject an explicit thing Vatican II taught. Instead, we are debating what Vatican II should look like in an idealized universe.

Yet we can’t say what Vatican II would look like properly implemented, because, spoiler alert, there is no authoritative guide to what Vatican II’s implementation was supposed to look like. The documents were often compromises that would be worked out later, and that “working out later” is very fluid and always in motion. You may think tone policing is a productive part of debate, and there’s no doubt temperatures should be lowered. Yet this is very much a debate tailor made to our social media age: a lot of bromides and rhetoric without really doing anything 

If one is looking for a clearer case of bromides and rhetoric without really doing anything, look no further than the debate  about Vatican II between Crisis Magazine and Professor Larry Chapp.  I know people want to read the debate for themselves, but please, save yourself the time and do something productive instead.  What's that?  We want to hear about it?  Okay, but I warned you!

Why should we care about Vatican II?  Professor Chapp says BUT MUH CHRISTOCENTRIC ECCLESIOLIOGY!  If you're wondering what "Christocentric Ecclesiology" is, what are some examples of it, what it shows that the Church before 1962 allegedly did not, and why that matters today, look, just take his word for it.  He has a Ph.D he got writing about one of the big theological influences at the Council, okay?  In the article, the Professor is clearly delivering a lecture to students who have long stopped caring what the teacher is saying, and he views it really important they care about the material, not in a "this will be on the test" way, but in a "this will change your life" way. Yet the students aren't listening.  Or worse, they are listening, and they're cracking jokes about their boomer professor.  The professor knows, and is getting very mad about it.  Which just makes the students laugh and snicker harder.  

Go ahead and read the piece at Crisis.  It isn't some grand challenge to the Council.  Contra what Chapp says (entirely for the purpose of his own narrative construction, not as honest academic analysis), it isn't a polemic for the time before 1962.  It is instead a recognition that most debates about Vatican II aren't debates about Vatican II, but about something else.  Often, its something Vatican II is silent on, or the insight it offers is very little and not terribly enlightening.

What are the things that matter most in the Church today?  What does an ecumenical Council written 60 years ago in a different time say about them?  This idea that ecumenical councils are these grand documents that speak to all ages is absurd.  Nicaea doesn't speak to the 21st century Christian, even if its doctrinal definitions and pronouncements about the person of Christ are super important.  But every debate at the council or word put to pen?  That's for academics.  For everyone else, in time Nicaea faded from relevance, and became just another ecumenical council that solved some really important things, but you don't actually have to think about.  This is one of the important councils.  There are other ecumenical councils that probably didn't accomplish anything in their age, and were immediately forgotten about, and aren't even an academic curiosity for the bourgeois like Professor Chapp.  (That's okay!)

To some (such as Mark Brumley at Ignatius Press), what they want is "moving on with Vatican II, not moving on from Vatican II."  But what does this mean?  I can tell you what moving on with Trent and Nicaea does.  Can I with Vatican II?  Maybe!  I could talk about the inclusion of things like a clear renunciation of Anti-Semitism, or the beginning of the process (very much unfinished) of how to deal with a dramatically more educated laity who now have the resources (and free time) to take part in the governance of the Church on a scale simply not possible before the Industrial and Communications Revolutions.  What are those like Professor Chapp going to go to the mattresses for on Vatican II, and say this is why it mattered, and more importantly, this is why it still matters today?  "Christocentric Ecclesiology" or the Council Fathers "had in view the ongoing relevance of the God of Jesus Christ in a world gone mad" isn't going to cut it.  

The beautiful part about this debate is time is on the side of those who say its time to move on.  All we have to do is ask why it still matters.  In time, we're going to be proven right.