The year was 1904, and the Catholic world was embroiled in controversy. A heretical priest, Fr. Alfred Loisy, was spreading the error of modernism in books and articles. Today the term is thrown around loosely as an insult on the internet, but it has a real meaning distinct from the usual use of the word “modern.” In the technical sense that the Catholic Church defines it, “modernism” is an error about the nature of dogma and the origin of Divine Revelation. Instead of dogmas expressing objective truths about reality revealed by an objectively knowable God and proven to be from God by the presence of miracles and prophecies (like the resurrection of Christ), in the modernist view, dogmas are useful symbolic phrases expressing our inner-religious experience, which wells up within us and constitutes “revelation.” Notably, it has little to nothing to do with the Mass.
Loisy’s system redefining Christianity as a bottom-up projection of human experience denied the Divinity of Christ, the Resurrection, the Real Presence, the institution of the Catholic Church by Christ, and every other dogma in their traditional sense by changing the definition of the terms while keeping the vocabulary and treating them all as symbolic and detached from historical facts. For example, “Jesus is the Son of God” does not mean that Jesus is the literal, ontological Son of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God. Rather, in Loisy’s system, Jesus was a mere man claiming to be the coming messiah with a uniquely high perception of His relation to God. “Jesus is the Son of God” reflects not objective reality, but the subjective perception of Christ, translated into words.
Catholic theologian Fr. Eugène Portalié noted the highly distorted reading that Loisy gave to the First Vatican Council:
For my part, I know of no theologian who has ever submitted a text to such torture. The Council declares that: “[1] to make our faith reasonable, it has pleased God to join to His interior graces external proofs of His revelation, [2] especially the miracles and prophecies which manifest clearly God’s omnipotence and limitless knowledge, and which [3] are most certain indicators that a revelation is divine, well adapted to the minds of everyone.”
According to Portalié, Loisy twists the text to make it say the opposite of this, paraphrasing his reading of this section of Vatican I as including that “(1) there is no real reason to believe but inner feeling and experience of divine life” and “(2) miracles are divine facts of the same order as other, natural facts and do not show a special intervention of God.”
The fact that Loisy could so badly mangle such a clear text shows that the problem with dissent against the Catholic Faith does not always rest with an ambiguous or unclear teaching of the Church (although Catholics are free to argue that X teaching could be worded better while accepting an orthodox meaning), but sometimes with a will bent on trying to read what it wants to read and hear what it wants to hear according to an incompatible framework. In 1908, the Catholic Church officially condemned his ideas, and Loisy was excommunicated after he refused to revoke his positions.
There is a lesson here for us in the heated controversies over Vatican II. The dissent and confusion that followed the Second Vatican Council cannot be laid squarely at the feet of its teachings, any more than we can blame the Bible for the selective and distorted readings of isolated passages that some people give when they fail to listen to the guidance of the Church to which that Bible was given. Even if there were ambiguous passages, we have to ask: Why were many people so eager to read Vatican II as a rupture with past teaching in the first place, rather than as a reaffirmation of Church teaching with some development, as the Church herself has said? To this, we must turn to history. What follows will be suggestive and is not intended to be a full explanation.
First, we should consider that, in the past, the Catholic Faith was often transmitted to the faithful in terms of doctrinal propositions and moral rules, which were embodied and reinforced by a Catholic subculture. These propositions and rules were good—certainly better than the catechesis that the last few generations of Catholics have received in the United States. Still, this method of transmission was too shallow on its own, and arguably left Catholics vulnerable to changing social structures. One could memorize the lines of the Baltimore Catechism in a superficial way, while underneath the surface, a Catholic is being formed more deeply by the assumptions of secular philosophies contrary to these propositions and rules. It is worth noting that the Netherlands had an exemplary example of this: an extremely strong Catholic subculture with its own schools, newspapers, political parties, labor unions, hospitals, etc. Yet the erroneous Dutch Catechism emerged from this world, and the subculture crumbled rapidly in the 1960s.
What led this broader system to collapse? One pressure point was arguably the mass mobilizations brought on by World Wars I and II. Whole generations of young men were thrust out of their strong Catholic communities which shared their assumptions and spent years side by side with those of other religions and worldviews. These men returned to their communities with new perspectives and new questions. In Europe, the widespread displacement brought on by the wars and by shifting borders leading to mass expulsions afterward likely had a similar effect.
Another point of stress was new technology speeding up globalization. Between Vatican I and Vatican II, we saw the invention of telephones, cars, airplanes, radio, television. Contact between groups that most people would likely only have read about in books became far more normal. One thinks of Thomas Merton writing in The Seven Storey Mountain about a Hindu monk he befriended in the 1930s. Urbanization and especially suburbanization led people to move, which broke up the social transmission of the Catholic Faith. Families living in new American suburbs in the 1950s may no longer have Catholics as their neighbors, and the new technologies of radio, television, and recorded music introduce the ideas and highly individualistic assumptions of a rapidly secularizing wider society directly into the home, which, even though relatively clean due to the social standards and censorship of the day, were not always compatible with the Catholic Faith at the deepest level. They also intensified a desire to conform to a common culture. Of course, Catholics also still read the op-ed pages of newspapers.
One final, highly important factor is that Catholics were being trained by society to think in terms of their own subjectively felt needs, desires, and opinions. We can think of examples which were only a few decades old in the 1960s: pop-psychology, consumerism, and advertising. Catholics were taught by the Church to be guided by objective rules and doctrinal propositions, but their day-to-day lives increasingly reinforced and required the guidance of their own subjectivity.
Vatican II was in large part intended to help Catholics navigate this new world with their faith intact, but it was received in an environment in which secularization and an insecurity about their place in the world had deeply penetrated the minds and shaped the wills of many Catholics. Those reading this have lived with the failed promises of that world. Let us invite those who have grown dissatisfied with it to know Christ and His Church anew.
Photo by Caleb Miller on Unsplash
