Columnist for the New York Times Ross Dothat, a reliable guide in Catholic matters, tells us in a recent column – “Pope Francis and the end of the imperial papacy” -- that the late pope had unraveled “the attempted doctrinal settlements of previous popes,” thereby “unsettling conservative like me.”
The unraveling of papal authority had been hastened by “two
rebellions” tolerated by Francis. The first involved a partly successful
suppression of the Latin Mass. “After Vatican II in the late 1960s… Pope Paul
VI “remade the church’s liturgy” The pope “commanded enough deference that he
was able to swiftly consign the mass that every Catholic in the world had grown
up with to the modern equivalent of the catacombs – to church basements, hotel
rooms and schismatic chapels.”
When Francis later attempted a like suppression, “reversing
the permissions granted by [Pope] Benedict, only his most loyal bishops really
went along, and the main effect was to stir resistance and complaint.” Francis,
in other words, misread the Catholic times, and none of his closest spiritual
advisors sought to share with the audacious pope, Isaac Newton’s 3rd
Law of motion: “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The
resistance, Dothat tells us, garnered “new media attention for the old Latin
Mass and [increased] traditionalism’s cachet among younger Catholics.”
The second notable rebellion occurred among the bishops
“after the Vatican’s tentative move towards allowing some kind of blessing for
same-sex couples… That was the last of Francis’ explicit liberal moves, his
attempts to use traditional authority in the service of progressive goals… It
provoked a notable refusal from the African bishops, the conservative church of
the developing world rejecting the progressivism of the developed world, which
forced Rome to retreat into defensive ambiguity,” the last refuge of political
scoundrels.
There is a bright side to the breakdown of papal authority,
according to Dothat. Perhaps, he speculates, “the kind of deconstruction that
happened under Francis was providentially necessary” to rebuild a tattered
papal authority. This view of things does not represent a Panglossian optimism;
it is, instead, a frank avowal that with God all things are possible or, as
Soren Kierkegaard puts it: Between man’s purposes in time and God’s purposes in
eternity, there is an infinite qualitative difference. It might be wise to
regard progressivism’s foreshortened view of things as the 21st
century’s original sin, a cultural disorder to be overcome rather than
reflexively embraced. For the trueborn
progressive, there is no past, only a swiftly passing moment, and the future is
an entertaining imaginary utopian construct.
Part of the business of the papacy is to lead Christians in
the truth, the way and the life. This requires a solid foundation in Christian
doctrine, ethics and morals; that is to say, it requires a thorough
understanding of the Bible, the cannon of the Christian church – the faithful
gathered in Christ – and a humility that yields to G. K. Chesterton’s notion
that the theological franchise must be extended to those who have gone before
us. Pope Francis’ predecessor was Pope Benedict, Pope John Paul’s theologian.
It does seem just a touch impudent to operate on the assumption that in matters
of faith and morals you are Thomas Aquinas’ master before you have mastered his
writings.
“Tradition is the democracy of the dead,” Chesterton wrote
in Orthodoxy. “It means giving a vote
to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors. Tradition refuses to submit
to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking
about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth;
tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
At its root, progressivism imperiously dismisses the past
before plunging into an uncertain future that has no guideposts, other than
those suggested by academic experts. Woodrow Wilson, a most audacious
progressive president, operated on the assumption that the U.S Constitution and
its various amendments should be regarded as having no more authority over the
affairs of the republic than statutes written by state legislators. The
country, Wilson thought, would be better served by an unbound administrative intelligentsia.
In the progressive scheme, it is impossible to trace to its
historical roots an idea such as the American Republic or the divinely promised
permanence of the Christian church, because all roots have been uprooted and
tradition is no more than the time and place in which we stand, alone and defenseless
against the onslaught of time and chance. Nothing is more impermanent than the passing
moment. If we cannot stand on a Rock, we cannot maintain our balance on
shifting sands.
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