Is the Second Vatican Council receding in the church’s rearview mirror? Has the Francis pontificate raised new and difficult questions about the exercise of papal authority? Is the Roman Church poised to become non-Western? Can popes and bishops teach effectively in a time of rampant individualism and social fragmentation? In short: Quo vadis? We asked five Catholic theologians to reflect on the challenges facing the Catholic Church in these early decades of the twenty-first-century—and to chart a path forward.
—R. R. Reno
Governance
by Christopher Ruddy
Pope Francis is both a cause and a symptom of the present crisis of governance in the Catholic Church. Deliberate doctrinal ambiguity, egregious (in)action on clerical sexual abuse, centralization of papal authority in the name of synodality, a problematic conception of the relationship between ordained and lay authority, mixed signals sent to a German Church teetering on the edge of heresy and schism—these and other actions have pushed Catholicism into uncharted territory.
We face the sad irony of a supposedly synodal, decentralized Church that, to raise a seemingly minor example, forbids some faithful Catholics from worshipping in their parishes and dictates to pastors what can be printed in parish bulletins and on parish websites.
And yet Francis is also a symptom of the centuries-long process that has unduly centralized ecclesial authority in Rome and fostered a cult of papal personality—often at the behest of the laity. The result has been a conception of the pope as an absolute monarch enthroned above the rest of the Church, oracular and isolated.
Pope Francis didn’t cause all of these problems, and his successor won’t resolve all of them. How can any church leader, for instance, exercise authority effectively in an age marked by liquid modernity and a crisis of trust? Three desiderata seem especially urgent: doctrinal integrity, juridical accountability and transparency, and an ecclesial culture of participation and responsibility.
Doctrine might seem an odd place to start a discussion of ecclesial governance. But every bishop’s first task—and the bishop of Rome’s task above all—is to preach and teach faithfully. The Lord proclaimed Peter the “rock” of the Church only after he had professed that Jesus was “the Christ, the son of the living God.” The Church of Rome, for its part, has historically been known for the purity of its apostolic teaching. St. John Henry Newman spoke of the papacy, for instance, as a remora—a “break”—against the deforming innovations of heretics. Rome’s job, so to speak, has been to conserve, not to innovate:
It is said, and truly, that the Church of Rome possessed no great mind in the whole period of persecution. Afterwards for a long while, it has not a single doctor to show; St. Leo, its first, is the teacher of one point of doctrine; St. Gregory, who stands at the very extremity of the first age of the Church, has no place in dogma or philosophy.
Sound doctrine is not simply the business of theologians, but makes possible good ecclesial governance. When the deposit of faith is undermined, doctrines become “policies” that one pope promotes and another pope reverses. The pope becomes a president, and an apostolic exhortation an executive order. The Church, built upon the apostolic faith, cannot be governed that way.
But as scholars such as Hermann Pottmeyer and Klaus Schatz have shown, such instability is a constant threat because of how the modern papacy has developed. Pottmeyer has argued that nineteenth-century papal Rome was shaped by “three traumas”: the ecclesial trauma of movements (conciliarism, Gallicanism) that sought to counter papal primacy; the political trauma of state-controlled churches in France and elsewhere; and the cultural-intellectual trauma of Enlightenment-era rationalism and liberalism.
The response of Rome was to reassert the primacy and authority of the pope as the counterweight to these disintegrating forces in the Church and the world. Catholics needed to look to Rome, “over the mountains [the Alps]” (hence “Ultramontanism”), for direction.
One result has been, as the late Dominican Jean-Marie Tillard put it, a pope who is “more than a pope.” That is, a pope who, in the popular ecclesial imagination, is quasi-divine and the source of all ecclesial insight and initiative. For instance, in some popular piety he became one of the “three white bearers of Christ,” along with the Eucharistic Host and Mary. The flip side of such aggrandizing centralization was a growing lack of initiative elsewhere, a kind of learned helplessness among both clergy and laity.
Doctrinally, the two Vatican councils provide a corrective to ultramontane views of governance. They affirm that the papacy is a “permanent and visible source and foundation of unity of faith and communion” in the Church. The pope—as Peter’s successor—has a unique, nontransferable responsibility to ensure unity among the bishops and, through them, the entire Church. The two councils also made strong claims about papal primacy—it is “full,” “supreme,” and “immediate”—and infallibility.
But Vatican I, often held to be the charter of ultramontanism, did not write the popes a blank check. First, it taught that papal primacy did not detract from other bishops’ authority, but rather “supported and defended” it. Vatican II underscored that teaching when it proclaimed that bishops are not “vicars of the Roman Pontiffs,” but the true shepherds of their dioceses.
Second, Vatican I held that the Holy Spirit does not give popes divine inspiration to set forth new teaching, but instead gives them assistance to guard and expound the apostolic deposit of faith. No pope can regard himself as a Mormon president, receiving new revelation and reversing previous teaching. Vatican II deepened Vatican I’s teaching when it affirmed that the pope and the other bishops stand under the Word of God, not above it. They are its servants, not its masters.
A striking instance of that subordination came during Vatican II, when Paul VI suggested—amid concerns that an affirmation of episcopal collegiality would undermine papal primacy—that the council teach that the pope is “accountable to the Lord alone.” The conciliar Theological Commission politely but firmly rejected his proposal, noting that the pope is “bound to revelation itself, to the fundamental structure of the Church, to the sacraments, to the definitions of earlier Councils, and other obligations too numerous to mention.”
Benedict XVI echoed the Theological Commission’s words when, just a few weeks into his pontificate, he took possession of his episcopal chair (cathedra) at St. John Lateran in Rome:
The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope’s ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God’s Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.
This obedience is, paradoxically, a liberation. Yes, doctrine develops; tradition cannot be reduced to mere repetition. The Church can go deeper, remember things that have been forgotten, recover what has been marginalized.
But, in words Vatican I borrowed from St. Vincent of Lérins, any true development must always have the “same sense and meaning” as previous teaching. Deeply troubling in this regard are recent claims by high-ranking cardinals that the “sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching [on homosexuality] is no longer correct,” and that “on some issues the understanding of human nature and moral reality upon which previous declarations of doctrine were made were in fact limited or defective.” Such views would sever the Church from the faith of the apostles. They would leave her in perpetual suspension and provisionality, unable to teach with binding authority. The Catholic Church cannot function that way.
Second, good governance calls for the rule of law and the transparent, accountable administration of justice. Pope Francis has made real, if uneven progress on the Vatican’s finances, but his record on sexual abuse is appalling. There is presently an almost incomprehensible combination of inaction toward, and protection of, sexually abusive bishops and priests—for example, Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta and Fr. Marko Rupnik. Such deeds have rendered papal leadership on this front literally incredible.
Justice must be seen to be done. For instance, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, Pope Francis’s 2019 motu proprio, offered helpful norms for addressing sexual abuse and its concealment by bishops and religious superiors. Its implementation, however, has limped along. Bishops have been removed from office as a result of Vos Estis–mandated investigations, but the results of those investigations are often kept hidden or only partially revealed. This lack of accountability and transparency undermines effective, credible governance.
The restoration of trust calls, finally, for a culture of participation and responsibility. Pope Francis’s signature initiative is clearly synodality—which the Vatican’s International Theological Commission has described as “the involvement and participation of the whole People of God in the life and mission of the Church”—and he has already taken steps to ensure that this initiative will survive beyond his pontificate.
Although controversial, the pope’s synodal vision can be seen as consistent with John Paul II’s call in Novo Millennio Ineunte (2001) for the Church of the third millennium to be “the home and the school of communion.” A spirituality of communion, John Paul proposed, “makes us able to share [other believers’] joys and sufferings, to sense their desires and attend to their needs, to offer them deep and genuine friendship.” He further suggested that such a spirituality of communion must give rise to structures of communion at every level, from the parish to the global Church. It is striking, for example, how little voice diocesan priests have in the selection of bishops, in comparison with the selection of leaders in religious life. Trust grows when people are heard and respected.
Pottmeyer has noted, though, that modern Catholicism, too, often identifies communion with uniformity, so that it struggles with public disagreement. Meetings of the Synod of Bishops under John Paul II, for instance, were often tightly controlled. Structures of communion are essential if insufficient means for airing and resolving differences. The present synodal process has been in part an attempt to redress such concerns, but often it has been theologically impoverished, jargon-filled, and self-referential. In addition, the unexpected publication of Fiducia Supplicans, which addressed a matter over which the synod was still deliberating, undercut the integrity of the entire synodal project.
Trust is the element that makes possible a culture of participation and responsibility. It is the fundamental condition for the exercise of authority, especially in a voluntary community whose law is love. Synodality need not be a Trojan horse for ecclesial heterodoxy and division. But in the absence of transparent, orthodox, and genuinely collaborative governance, it will be.
Christopher Ruddy is associate professor of historical and systematic theology at the Catholic University of America.
The Church of the Secular West
by Michael Hanby
When he summoned the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII urged participants to scrutinize the “signs of the times.” At the conclusion of the council, the final document, Gaudium et Spes, did exactly that, offering a bracing description of the modern age. We have embarked upon a “new stage of history,” one “triggered by the intelligence and creative energies of man,” who is “stricken with wonder at [his] own discoveries and power.” “Profound and rapid changes are spreading by degrees around the whole world,” and yet the “spiritual agitation and the changing conditions of life are part of a broader and deeper revolution.” The document goes on to describe the situation of man in the modern world in terms of a number of dramatic tensions: between confidence and doubt, power and wisdom, wealth and poverty, interdependence and alienation, fixity and evolutionary change, hope and despair.
This bipolar characterization of postwar modernity doubtless contributed to the bipolar reception of the council itself. Divergent interpretations of the conciliar documents, but more fundamentally of the “spirit” of the Council and its meaning as an “event,” have simmered during the past half century, boiling over in the last decade. Gaudium et Spes was correct to identify the revolutionary conditions of modernity, which we now know to include a technologically capacitated revolt against the order of being and against human nature itself. These developments place the human future in question and make the perennial question of “man” existentially urgent. Offering the first magisterial admission of Christian complicity in the rise of atheism, the council confronted the various kinds of “atheist humanism” that had emerged in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although “atheism” is a protean phenomenon, the council recognized that modern atheism stipulates that the realization of human freedom and potential depends upon emancipation from God. This project of emancipation assumes a finite conception of God, encourages a truncated conception of human freedom, and leads to the reduction of the human being and the human mind, which is inevitable when man is cut off from his transcendent destiny.
The prospect of a de-Christianized and dehumanized future—a prospect that has become our present—forms the backdrop to the Christological and anthropological focus of the document: a point which was underscored again and again in the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Against atheist humanism, the council maintained that divine agency and human freedom are proportionally and not inversely related. God liberates us to become more fully human; the human calling and human destiny are revealed and fulfilled in Christ. But the council married this Christological affirmation of human freedom, a perennial teaching of the Church, to a new emphasis on the “legitimate autonomy” of secular pursuits. Declaring herself a champion of “the rights of man,” the Church expressed “great esteem” for “the dynamic movements of today by which these rights are everywhere fostered.” She renounced any “proper mission in the political, economic, or social order” and declared that there should be “no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and religious life on the other.”
This is right and just, but it is also easily misunderstood. When interpreted apart from the document’s Christological and anthropological center, or its Thomistic understanding of human nature, or Dignitatis Humanae’s insistence on truth as the source of freedom, or the doctrine of the Church in Lumen Gentium 1, it reads—or can be made to read—as an unqualified endorsement of liberal democracy or even a program for Christian “social-democratic” cooperation with Marxism in the advance of secularly defined human progress. Combined with this optimistic misreading of the dramatic tension of modernity, this Christological turn toward the world fueled the hope that our “new stage of history” might bring us to what Jacques Maritain called “a new age of civilization.” A staunch opponent of fascism and an influential thinker for a Church emerging from the catastrophic inhumanity of World War II, Maritain made so bold as to speak of a “New Christendom,” one characterized by “the growth in awareness of the temporal office of the Christian.” He envisioned “a new style of sanctity, which one can characterize above all as the sanctity and sanctification of secular life.” One hears the echo of this hope—modernity fulfilling itself from within, as it were—in the “space age optimism” that colors Gaudium et Spes. For example, we are told that “modern man is on the road to a more thorough development of his own personality, and to a growing discovery and vindication of his own rights.” Rights we have aplenty, and more every day, it seems, though each ironically enlarges the power of the state to intervene in people’s lives. But the thorough development of modern man’s “personality” has not exactly panned out.
The self-proclaimed allies of Pope Francis often speak about Vatican II as if the years between the end of the council and 2013 were an obstacle to its implementation. They advance a progressive interpretation that would effectively erase the two preceding pontificates. The ironic effect of these efforts has been to discredit the council itself in the eyes of many traditionalists and to elicit more critical scrutiny from many who had previously defended it.
Though the ambiguities are real, opposition to Vatican II is misguided. The council is not a capitulation to the modern world, as some traditionalists presume. Rather, Gaudium et Spes reflected the larger desire of the Church to enter into more nuanced confrontation with the modern world precisely on the basis of Christ’s descent into history, and to embrace the Catholic tradition more comprehensively than was allowed by the preceding Neo-Thomism. There are real gains here—in Christology, anthropology, ecclesiology, and historical analysis—that need to be defended still. Yet any attempt to implement the council faithfully in the coming years must reckon with the spectacular failure of the “New Christendom” to come to fruition. The council is hardly to be faulted for failing to anticipate the future, though this failure should serve as a caution against the conceit that we can easily discern the movement of the Spirit in history. (It’s almost a certainty that the methods of the social sciences blind rather than augment our vision.) But only those blessed with the gift of prophecy could have anticipated the astonishing collapse of Catholic Christianity throughout the Western world in the immediate aftermath of the council. No one could have foreseen the breakdown of the communist bloc or the emergence of a vast new global technocratic order with propaganda and surveillance capacities that would have been the envy of earlier totalitarian regimes. In the mid-twentieth century, the scope and shape of the technological conquest of human nature remained hidden, even from the scientific community who would be responsible for bringing it about, as did the cultural and ontological revolution this triumph would set in motion. Ours is substantially a different world from that of the postwar generation. The “signs of the times” must be scrutinized anew.
Some responsibility for these dashed hopes must fall on the council itself. The protracted battle over its meaning, which began even before the ink had dried on its pronouncements, indicates that the council never quite succeeded in uniting these salutary elements and many voices into an intelligible synthesis. There were problems as well with its diagnosis of “the secular” in modernity. The approach was not mistaken, but it was incomplete. The council failed to give more than passing attention to its own recognition that atheism tends to take on a “systematic expression.” Subsequent scholarship and the passage of time have helped us to see more clearly that in modernity the secular is not merely the indifferent site of human flourishing imagined by the prevailing liberal order. It is a metaphysical construct that defines our “social imaginary,” offering a total interpretation of reality that systematically excludes the apprehension of God from our operative notions of being, nature, knowledge, and truth. God is banished from our most authoritative forms of knowledge, from our modes of social organization, and from the basic habits and patterns of life. Christianity still stands within the permanent revolution of modernity. It serves the modern secular regime as a visible reminder of a past in constant need of overcoming—and in this sense we can even be grateful for the growing hostility to Christianity as a sign, despite everything, of its enduring vitality. Nevertheless, we must recognize that the prevailing attitude is no longer one of atheism in the nineteenth-century sense. “The secular” is not an argument against the rationality of belief. It is a comprehensive conception of reality devoid of God. This conception of reality dominates the modern world, and thus influences all of us to greater and lesser degrees, not at the level of argument, but as an axiomatic, unconscious, and therefore unquestioned assumption permeating our apprehension of everything. Whatever faith each of us can muster must be carved out of the inertial background of the secular, which continually frames a faith now reduced to a “lifestyle choice” within this godforsaken reality.
The triumph of the secular enacts and imposes what Nietzsche dramatically called the death of God and what John Paul II and Benedict XVI called the “eclipse of the sense of God and of man.” Augusto Del Noce calls the corresponding attitude one of irreligion, an apprehension of the world and a conception of reason in which God is no longer even a serious question. This irreligion is no obstacle to an unserious invocation of God that baptizes the progressive movement of history. The death of God and the death of Christianity are not the same thing, as Nietzsche saw. The Church and her teachings can be deployed in a cynical fashion for the sake of secular political goals. They can even endure as a pious addendum to an essentially godless apprehension of reality or plan of action. But it is a sign of the times that in the irreligious world of the contemporary secular, “atheism” in the old sense hardly seems worth the bother. By and large, our educated elites don’t think of God. For them, he neither exists nor does not exist.
There are important truths inherent in the affirmation of the world offered by Maritain and many others, truths that follow from a proper understanding of creation and of God’s descent into history in the Incarnation. Properly understood, the Church’s “turn toward the world” at Vatican II sought to overcome an extrinsicism of the supernatural, which had sought to protect the gratuity of grace by distinguishing sharply between grace and nature, but which had the unwitting effect of affirming the secular in its secularity. In keeping with Maritain’s hope, the council endorsed a positive conception of the laity as something more than merely “not ordained,” and thereby prompted a salutary line of theological reflection on the distinctively lay role in the mission of the Church, culminating in John Paul II’s Christifideles Laici. But as in so many things, the narrow strait between the Scylla of a top-down clericalism of priests and the Charybdis of a bottom-up clericalism of lay “experts” has been the road not taken, as the Synod on Synodality amply demonstrates. It is obvious in retrospect that the Church’s turn toward the world has ended not in a “new style of sanctity” and “the sanctity and sanctification of secular life” but in the secularization of the sacred and even the desacralization of Christianity itself, with clergy and theologians often leading the way.
The visible signs of this secularized Christianity are widespread. Of course one should not fail to mention the stench of rot and corruption—sexual, moral, financial, political—that seeps out seemingly every time one turns over a spade in the Church. The damage inflicted on the authority of the Church and the souls of the faithful is impossible to overstate. Whatever pathologies underlie these evils, it is obvious that the perpetrators of abuse and corruption fear neither God nor man. The other signs are less spectacular. The attempted rapprochement with the modern world ignited a multigenerational war on ineffability: The faithful witnessed a wave of iconoclasm not seen since the Reformation, leaving in its wake a thoroughly effable liturgy whose enactment often conceals rather than reveals the mystery, glory, and transcendence of God—an un-mystical celebration for a demystified world. With the loss of form and finality in her conceptions of nature, and the demise of a mystical and sacramental imagination in worship, the Church comes more and more to resemble an NGO in its manner of thinking and acting. “Global Catholicism,” a new term of art among progressive Catholics, betrays a sociologistic mindset. The social sciences supplant theology and philosophy as the Church’s predominant form of thought and speech, depriving it of a compelling word to speak to the world. The therapeutic patois of human resource directors crowds out the older languages of the soul.
Is it really surprising that, apart from acts of holiness and heroism by individual priests, the “field hospital” Church all but withdrew from the field during the pandemic, willfully shuttering her houses of worship while more “essential” enterprises carried on? Or that the Church seemed to have little to say—about death, judgment, suffering, courage, eternal life, or even power—beyond exhortations to follow the dictates of the CDC, NIH, and WHO? At this very moment, confronted by unprecedented assaults on human nature itself, we hear from Rome tepid recitations of classical formulas about human dignity, awkwardly conjoined to appeals to the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Meanwhile, cardinals of the Church eagerly suggest that the Church’s understanding of human nature has been rendered obsolete by sociology and “science.” They seem oblivious or indifferent to the nature and limits of scientific knowledge, its metaphysical presuppositions and implications, its history of ideological contamination, the fact that such appeals have been used to justify atrocities in the past, and the possibility of their legitimating a new technocratic totalitarianism in the future. Whatever one thinks of the methodology, the theological rationale, or the not-so-hidden agendas of the synodal process, it simply boggles the mind that, during a time of ontological and cultural revolution, the Church should be spending its time, money, and energies on an exercise that captures the hearts of no one outside the class of progressive ecclesiocrats. It is as if the Church were in the grip of entropy. Is it any surprise that vast numbers of people, when deprived of the Church for a year, come to believe that they can live quite easily without it? The impression, overwhelming at times, is of a Christianity that is exhausted and, to many who love the Church and have not given up hope, exhausting.
In the years ahead, the Church will face any number of “messes” desperately in need of cleaning up. The modern world is inimical to authority, since authority presupposes a given order of reality that is inherently meaningful. The modern crisis of authority has been exacerbated by the Church’s unwilling sacrifice of the authority conferred upon her, and by her willing renunciation of the authority that is her responsibility. The former came about by scandal, the latter through “pastoral conversions,” “paradigm shifts,” and interminable processes of “dialogue” that seem never to say anything. It seems, at times, as if truth had followed beauty into exile. The disintegration of authority has had disastrous consequences for the unity of the Church, needlessly creating a de facto schism that could become a de jure schism if the Church’s slide into entropy is not arrested. It has taken a toll on the natural affection Catholics have for their pope and their Church. And it has damaged the Church’s witness.
It is impossible to witness to what you can no longer see. The Church cannot regain its lost authority without regaining its sight. This cannot be achieved merely through exercises of ecclesiastical power, nor through programs and “processes,” but only through a profound conversion of heart, mind, and vision. We cannot experience such a conversion or hope for the renewal of a genuinely Christian imagination unless we recognize that the eclipse of the sense of God and man is not an event external to the Church. The Church will not be able to heal her own wounds, much less the wounds of the secular world, until Catholics come to terms with the breadth and depth of our anonymous atheism.
Michael Hanby is associate professor of religion and philosophy of science at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America.
The Global Church
by Anthony Akinwale, O.P.
Sommes-nous les derniers chrétiens?” asked my Dominican confrere and teacher Fr. Jean-Marie Roger Tillard in a poignant public lecture in 1996. Twenty-eight years on, the signs of Christian decline in the Global North have not gone away. Yet the picture is more nuanced. Several dioceses in the United States and Europe reported record numbers of baptisms at the Easter vigil this year. Writing in the Catholic Herald, Philip Campbell summarized the reports: eighty-two adults received into the Church in a single Alabama parish; fifty baptisms and thirty confirmations at one Florida church; 7,135 adults baptized in France; and at Westminster Cathedral, record attendance at the Triduum, to the point where security personnel had to turn people away. The pictures of Tammy Peterson, podcaster and wife of Jordan, being received into the Church in Toronto went round the world.
Even so, it might be too soon to declare that the tide has turned. In the words of the Jamaican reggae star Jimmy Cliff, there are still “many rivers to cross.” True, the human heart is restless until it rests in God; and Tillard answered his “question piquante” by affirming that, for as long as human beings search for answers to the question of the meaning of existence, we are yet to see the last generation of Christians. But not all who are restless are conscious of their restlessness. Persons unconscious of the human vocation—the vocation to seek answers to the question of meaning—may be uninterested in answering the Christian call. Besides, if birthrates are low, so will be baptisms. Adult baptisms are cause for rejoicing, but it is babies that make the future of a community.
As everyone knows, the picture in the Global South—most notably in Africa—is demographically very different. Last year the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University published an international league table of Catholics’ Mass attendance. Ninety-four percent of Nigerian Catholics attend Mass every week; in second place is Kenya, with 72 percent. The lowest percentage, 7 percent, belongs to the Netherlands. But in Africa, too, it may be too early to blast an exultant trumpet.
Whether in the Global North or in the Global South, in antiquity or in modernity, the Church has always had to confront actors and factors threatening to erode her capacity and willingness to preach the Gospel. Today, she is surrounded by a cult of science, technology, rationalism, skepticism, nihilism, hedonism, and power addiction, as well as—paradoxical though it might sound—a cult of doctrineless religion. In the Global North, she has not resisted the corrosive effect of the religion of secularism: a religion of reason without faith, which marginalizes the Christian God. In the Global South, the news seems positive: healthy demographics, lively parishes, vibrant liturgies, and committed laity ready to bear witness to the faith even in the face of persecution and oppression, as in the far north of Nigeria. But whereas God is marginalized in the Global North, there is real and present danger of misrepresenting him in the Global South.
It’s tempting to attribute African religiosity to economic deprivation—tempting, and ignorant. Africans take the spiritual world seriously, and the Church in Africa is an assembly of the rich and the poor. The myth of the uneducated African, living on a continent with a large population of out-of-school children, ignores the equally large population of professionals, intellectuals, and students at every level of education—nursery, primary, secondary, and tertiary. The Church in Africa includes men, women, and children of various strata of economic and educational endowment. Her extraordinary growth has less to do with poverty than with a continent-wide metaphysical and religious worldview, a veritable praeparatio evangelica, which presents an opportunity for the Church in her unfinished but ongoing project of presenting Christ to the African spirit.
Nevertheless, there are challenges. On the religious front there is Pentecostalism, with its particular strain of sola fide, sola scriptura, sola gratia, and private revelation, a religion of the spirit without discernment, a pneumatology without ecclesiology. On the political front there is a militant and intolerant strain of instrumentalized Islam, with its center in the Sahel region stretching to the far north of Nigeria. Nigeria’s weak constitution has established weak institutions incapable of protecting fundamental human rights—especially the right to worship—from the forces of persecution.
The future of Catholicism will be a matter not of demographics but of fidelity to the Gospel of the crucified Christ, received, preserved, and transmitted by the apostles. If the Church in the Global North has declined because of reason without faith, the Church in Africa must avoid the temptation of faith without reason manifest in the bifurcation of religion and day-to-day life. Contrary to what Hegel says, the African is not deprived of rational faculties. And the tendency to separate faith and reason, found in both hemispheres, is alien to Catholicism. Reason without faith engenders atheism and agnosticism, while faith without reason engenders fanaticism and fundamentalism, blasphemy and heresy. Concretely, Catholicism must remain faithful to the Gospel and engage intelligently with social reality—not by way of a populist capitulation to local ideologies, but through discernment of what can and cannot be accepted in the surrounding culture.
The future depends above all on divine providence, on God’s wise direction of the affairs of the universe to the goodness that he is. But we must avoid a Monophysite reading of history, which downplays human agency: Our actions or inactions in the present will have consequences for the future. In avoiding a divorce between faith and reason, we should also avoid a dichotomy between intellectual-priest and pastor-priest. Pastors may not have to be intellectuals. But they must be intelligent in their reception, preservation, and transmission of apostolic tradition, with a keen knowledge of their flocks, and of the ideological currents that sweep through today’s global village.
The clergy must also hold together the tripartite identity of priest-prophet-king. Personal holiness will be necessary but insufficient, prophetic intelligence necessary but insufficient, pastoral competence necessary but insufficient. The priestly office entails offering the totality of our being and our world to God, striving to respond to the universal call to holiness of life. The prophetic office demands readiness to bear witness to the word of God before a world that is often unwilling to listen, a world that treats prophets with disdain, indifference, or persecution. And the kingly office of Christ demands managing the affairs of the world in accord with the loving will of God.
In short, the future Church must be led by priests and bishops who strive for holiness, intelligence, and competence, not one without the others. And the Church should seek to form an enlightened laity able and willing to live out their baptismal commitments.
The prophetic office is especially worth pausing over. It requires differentiated acceptance—and sometimes categorical refusal—of the spirit of the age. The Holy Spirit is betrayed by a simple eulogy of the signs of the times, especially when saying yes to them means saying no to the Gospel. For to capitulate is to repudiate martyrdom, and a Church that repudiates martyrdom will surely die. The Church of the future will be a Church of martyrs bearing common witness to the gospel of the crucified Christ as she navigates the road of history with its bumps, potholes, and craters.
The Church has a mission given by the risen Christ, who commanded his disciples to teach the world all he had taught them. As a good pedagogue, she must be wise and courageous in showing the meeting point between doctrine and life, between the word of God and the human heart.
In Africa—where the political elite is adept at manipulating ethnic diversity to control access to public office—the Church, in her clergy, lay faithful, and consecrated persons, must prophetically resist the temptations of ethnocentrism and racism. She must be a prophetic assembly of men and women of divergent ethnic communities. Transcending ethnic bigotry and xenophobia, she must be, as Vatican II teaches, a sign and instrument of communion with God and of unity among men.
But the Church must also repudiate a facile inclusivism that would gloss over the fundamental nature of discipleship, to the point of dispensing with repentance. One becomes a disciple when one is converted, and one is converted when one becomes a disciple. That is, perhaps, something the Church in the Global North is especially liable to forget. And a truly synodal Church would recognize and listen to the Church in the Global South.
There is something else the Global South can contribute to the synodal process: an awareness of the reality of material poverty—and a recognition that poverty of the sense of God causes some to impoverish others. In societies of the Global South, the Church is a sign and instrument of the reign of God in the midst of human distress.
Tillard, in the lecture to which I have referred, made a similar observation. Inspired by Chrysostom, Basil, Ambrose, Augustine, and Leo the Great, he noted one consequence of a more southern Church: “The Church has gone to the world of the poorest. There, she is able to become flesh in human distress and bear witness to the love of God for the most deprived of creatures.”
Anthony Akinwale, O.P., is deputy vice-chancellor of Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Nigeria.
The Magisterium
by Edward Feser
What Aristotle said about virtue—that it lies between extremes—is true of orthodoxy as well. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity requires avoiding so great an emphasis on the unity of the divine nature that one denies the distinctness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But it also requires avoiding so great an emphasis on the distinctness of the three Persons that one denies the unity of the divine nature. Trinitarian orthodoxy is to be found in the middle ground between the extremes of conflating the divine Persons (the heresy of modalism) and dividing the divine substance (the error of polytheism).
Catholic doctrine on the teaching authority of the pope is, similarly, a mean between extremes, with one extreme attributing too little power to the pope and the other attributing too much. Historically, the Church’s emphasis has been on rebutting the first extreme and emphasizing the broad scope of papal doctrinal authority. The First Vatican Council declares that a pope teaches infallibly when he speaks ex cathedra—when, using his full apostolic authority as universal and supreme pastor of the Church, he solemnly pronounces on some matter of faith or morals in an absolutely binding manner intended to settle it for all time. The Second Vatican Council states that, even when popes do not speak infallibly, their teaching on faith and morals ought normally to be received with an assent that is firm even if not absolute.
Yet the Church has also insisted that a pope cannot teach just whatever he wishes. Vatican I says that popes are given authority only to “religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles,” and “not so that they might . . . make known some new doctrine.” Vatican II says that the Church’s magisterial power “is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully.” In a 2005 homily, Pope Benedict XVI emphasized that the pope “is bound to the great community of faith of all times, to the binding interpretations that have developed throughout the Church’s pilgrimage. Thus, his power is not being above, but at the service of, the Word of God.” The pope has a duty to transmit the apostolic inheritance in full and intact. “It is incumbent upon him to ensure that this Word continues to be present in its greatness and to resound in its purity, so that it is not torn to pieces by continuous changes in usage.”
Both the scope and the limits of papal teaching authority are intelligible when it is kept in mind that this authority is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of preserving the deposit of faith. Because the faithful need assurance that what they receive from the Church is nothing more nor less than the same infallible doctrine delivered by Christ to the apostles, popes themselves have to be infallible when definitively stating that doctrine. But for the same reason, popes must neither add to nor contradict that deposit. That does not mean that development of doctrine is not possible. But as St. Vincent of Lérins and St. John Henry Newman made clear, a true development only ever draws out the implications of apostolic teaching, and never either reverses it or manufactures new teaching out of whole cloth.
The Church does not claim that popes are in general infallible outside of ex cathedra pronouncements; a handful of popes have in fact erred when teaching outside that context (which is why Vatican I limited infallibility to ex cathedra statements). The most spectacular case is that of Pope Honorius I, whose ambiguous teaching on the nature of Christ’s will gave aid and comfort to the Monothelite heresy. For this he was condemned by a later pope, St. Leo II, who wrote: “We anathematize . . . Honorius, who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted.” Three papally approved councils also condemned Honorius. Pope John XXII publicly preached an erroneous doctrine on the status of the soul after death. For this he was strongly criticized by many theologians of the day, which led him to recant on his deathbed.
Nor were these theologians out of line in daring to accuse a pope of doctrinal error. Though it has not been much emphasized, the Church has always acknowledged that popes can be respectfully admonished by the faithful when they appear to contradict the deposit of faith. In his commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that Paul’s rebuke of St. Peter, the first pope, set an example for subjects not to fear correcting prelates when they err in a way that poses “danger to the Gospel teaching”—and an example for prelates humbly to accept the correction. Such correction, says Aquinas, is not rebellion but rather “help” and “benefit” to those whose duty it is to safeguard the faith. And he teaches that this criticism can even be done publicly when the prelate’s offense is itself public and threatens to lead many into error.
Similarly, Pope Innocent III taught that “only on account of sin committed against the faith can I be judged by the church.” St. Robert Bellarmine stated that “it is lawful to resist the Pope . . . if he assaulted souls, or troubled the state, and much more if he strove to destroy the Church.” Newman approvingly quoted John Cardinal de Torquemada’s remark that “were the Pope to command anything against Holy Scripture, or the articles of faith, or the truth of the Sacraments, or the commands of the natural or divine law, he ought not to be obeyed.”
The instruction Donum Veritatis, issued during the pontificate of St. John Paul II, allowed that “it could happen that some Magisterial documents might not be free from all deficiencies,” so that “a theologian may, according to the case, raise questions regarding the timeliness, the form, or even the contents of magisterial interventions.” The instruction explicitly distinguishes such respectful criticism from “dissent” from perennial Church teaching.
Again, though, while acknowledging the possibility of error outside of ex cathedra contexts, and the legitimacy of respectful criticism of such error by the faithful, the Church has not put much emphasis on these themes. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of popes, even most of the bad ones, have been scrupulous where doctrine is concerned. The prospect of papal error and questions about its remedy thus have, for most of Church history, been matters of merely academic interest.
Today, however, they have been made pressing by the multiple doctrinally problematic statements, policies, and actions issuing from Rome during Pope Francis’s pontificate. Many examples could be given, but three are especially serious. The pope’s 2018 revision to the Catechism states that “the death penalty . . . is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” This seems to imply that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, not merely wrong under certain circumstances. Such a doctrine would contradict scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and two thousand years of consistent papal teaching.
Amoris Laetitia is ambiguous in that it might be interpreted to allow, in some cases, absolution and Holy Communion for those in invalid and adulterous marriages who are sexually active and lack a firm purpose of amendment. That would contradict Christ’s teaching on divorce, St. Paul’s teaching on worthiness to receive Communion, and what the Church has for two millennia held to be the implications of those teachings.
Worse, despite repeated pleas, the pope has refused to reaffirm the traditional doctrines these documents appear to contradict. Then there is Fiducia Supplicans, which permits the blessing of same-sex and adulterous couples (and not just the individuals who make up the couples). It is true that the document denies that such a couple’s “union” can itself be blessed, but the Church’s 2021 statement on the matter had ruled out any blessing that even “tends to acknowledge their unions,” let alone blesses the unions. And to bless a couple qua couple is precisely to acknowledge the union. Moreover, the distinction between blessing a couple and blessing a union is one that even the document’s defenders have had difficulty explaining, and to the average person comes across as hairsplitting sophistry.
To be sure, all of these problematic documents can, with some straining and if one is clever and theologically adept, be given an orthodox reading. But the Church has never regarded clearing this low bar as sufficient where matters of doctrine are concerned. She has frequently condemned not only outright heresy, but also propositions that are “badly expressed,” “ambiguous,” “prone to cause scandal,” or that “savor of heresy” even without being strictly heretical (to cite some of the “theological censures” traditionally recognized in Catholic theology). Honorius’s erroneous statements could with some creativity be given an orthodox reading, and arguably are less obviously problematic than the three cases just cited from Francis’s pontificate. Yet he was condemned all the same.
Pope Francis’s defenders have a tendency glibly to dismiss as “dissent” even the most respectful, measured, and well-argued criticism of these problematic documents, despite Donum Veritatis’s acknowledgement that not all criticism of magisterial acts amounts to dissent. They also sometimes dogmatically insist that if a pope makes or approves of some doctrinal statement, then it must, by that very fact, be consistent with the deposit of faith, appearances notwithstanding.
This ignores the fact that the Church does not claim in the first place that popes are infallible when not speaking ex cathedra, and that a handful of popes have in fact erred. It also reduces to vacuity the thesis that all papal teaching is consistent with tradition. In logic, the “No true Scotsman” fallacy is committed when one defines away inconvenient evidence by way of arbitrary stipulation. (For example: “No true Scotsman would be an empiricist!” “But David Hume was an empiricist!” “Oh? Then he must not really have been a Scotsman!”) Defenders of Pope Francis commit this fallacy when they suggest that if he contradicts some longstanding doctrine, it must not really have been part of the deposit of faith after all.
The exaggeration of papal power with respect to doctrine has been given various labels—examples would be “hyperpapalism,” “papal positivism,” and “Mottramism” (after a character in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited)—but none has become standard. Whatever we call it, it is imperative that a future pope repudiate it, for it does grave harm to souls and to the credibility of the Magisterium. In the wake of the doctrinal controversies fomented by Pope Francis, many Catholics faithful to the Church’s traditional teaching have been demoralized. Some have left the Church, judging that her claim to preserve the deposit of faith has been falsified. Many Protestant and Eastern Orthodox critics of the papacy take their objections to have been vindicated. The heterodox have been emboldened, confident that doctrine has changed and that it can change further in any direction one likes, as long as a pope willing to make the change is elected.
In addition to condemning hyperpapalism, the Magisterium should repudiate several tendencies that have facilitated this error, and which predate Francis’s pontificate even if they have intensified under it. The first is a neglect of Scholastic philosophy and theology, whose emphasis on clear and logical reasoning once lent rigor to magisterial documents. The second is a legalistic doctrinal minimalism that supposes that as long as one avoids explicitly contradicting some unpopular teaching—for example, on contraception, eternal damnation, or the need for conversion—then one has done one’s duty, even if said teaching is ignored and thereby rendered a dead letter. The third is the cult of personality that has come to surround the papacy, giving the false impression that Catholicism is just whatever the current pope happens to say it is.
Future popes ought to rededicate themselves to the proposition that the Roman pontiff is the servant of the deposit of faith, not its master. They should boldly proclaim the entirety of that deposit, especially the parts that modern civilization is most resistant to hearing. They should return to, and indeed put first and foremost, Benedict XVI’s derailed project of a “hermeneutic of continuity.” And they should prayerfully contemplate the case and fate of Pope Honorius.
Edward Feser is professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College.
The Liturgy
by Jarosław Kupczak, O.P.
In many places, the most serious, conscious, and active Catholics are those who gather every week at the nearest Tridentine Mass. They can expect a solemn, even beautiful celebration of the liturgy—often with Gregorian chant—and a theologically serious homily, full of respect for the traditional teaching of the Church. Amid the confusion and chaos of the modern world, which can be felt in our parishes, convents, and other Catholic communities, the small communities of the Tridentine Mass provide their members with intellectual support and formation, as well as relationships and friendships. Notwithstanding valid criticisms of these groups—which I will return to—there is surely something to be learned from them.
The spirit of these groups has something in common, in fact, with the student groups led by the young Karol Wojtyła in 1950s Kraków. On the summer kayaking trips that have entered into legend, Wojtyła would give everyone a small bilingual missal in which it was possible to follow the entire text of the Tridentine Mass in Polish. Mass was celebrated every morning wherever the group spent the night: in forests, in meadows, on the shore of a lake. The altar was built every day by the students from whatever was available: branches from the forest, even the kayaks themselves. Wojtyła usually celebrated Mass facing the students, reading the liturgical texts in Latin and preaching in Polish.
In one of his earliest published works, written for the Polish pastoral review Homo Dei in 1957, Wojtyła emphasized that active holidays in the bosom of nature—in the forest, by the lake, or by the sea—are an ideal way to introduce the mysteries of the faith, especially to the young. “An altar on oars, an altar on snow, an altar on backpacks—living nature (not only the product of human art) takes part in the sacrifice of the Son of God. Holy Mass becomes a morning prayer and the first thing we do together after waking up. A few words: a thought for the whole day.”
The point was not to surprise people with an unconventional or showy celebration of Holy Mass. The point was for the campers to understand that the eucharistic celebration could and should be an integral part of their everyday life—“the fount and apex of the whole Christian life,” as Vatican II would emphasize a decade later in its constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium.
Young Karol Wojtyła’s convictions about the shape of the liturgy were at the heart of the liturgical renewal movement in the Church in the first part of the twentieth century, prior to the Second Vatican Council and its constitution on liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium. All the main representatives of the liturgical movement—Dom Prosper Guéranger, Odo Casel, Dom Lambert Beauduin, Romano Guardini, Louis Bouyer—emphasized the need for the more conscious participation of the faithful in the liturgy. Liturgy had to be understood as the celebration of the entire people, not as a special technical performance by a single professional.
The constitution of the Second Vatican Council on liturgy is a very good document. Rooted in a profound Christological, trinitarian, and ecclesial theology of liturgy, it proposes a renewed liturgy as essential to the solid formation of the people of God and their introduction to the Christian mystery and a Christian way of life.
As it often with is Vatican II, however, one is faced with the question: If its documents were so good, what caused the havoc, confusion, and deformation of the postconciliar period? The answer lies in the mistaken understandings of conciliar aggiornamento that determined the direction and speed of postconciliar changes. The idea of Vatican II as a new beginning caused a break with the Catholic heritage: The Church seemed ashamed of her past, whereas the future was seen as requiring an adaptation to the secular. Ressourcement—intended to enrich and reinforce the Church’s teaching—led to a theological pluralism that seemed to question and undermine any traditional Catholic truth. The uniqueness of Christian faith and of the Catholic Church disappeared in an often nebulous, superficial, and hasty process of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. The list of bizarre postconciliar mishaps is endless.
The place where most of the faithful came into direct contact with Vatican II’s theology was the liturgy. Many changes were met with enthusiasm: the replacement of Latin with the vernacular, the expansion of biblical readings, greater participation by the lay faithful. Yet the bottom-up implementation of the council’s reforms also had its dark side. Many translations of the Latin liturgical texts were inaccurate; new liturgical texts in vernacular languages mirrored the dubious postconciliar theology by, among other things, devaluing the sacrificial character of the Mass; the new music composed after the council and sung in national languages was banal and sentimental and did not match the solemnity of Gregorian chant. Priests often understood the liturgical reform as an invitation to spontaneous improvisation and constant experimentation, and among the laity, the focus shifted away from God and toward the congregating community itself.
It is impossible to understand the rise of the Tridentine Mass movement in recent decades without seeing it as a reaction to the postconciliar theological and liturgical crisis. There are, however, serious problems with the movement. In many Tridentine Mass circles, the search for identity has centered not on rectifying postconciliar theological abuses, described by Benedict XVI as evincing a hermeneutics of rupture, but on criticizing and rejecting the council itself. Especially among Catholics who do not remember preconciliar times, nostalgia for the pontificate of Pius XII and criticism of what happened afterward serve as a simplistic framework for understanding the complicated contemporary history of the Church.
The Church’s response to this traditionalist movement has varied across time. The intention of the Second Vatican Council was not to create a new, alternative Mass, but to reform the Roman Mass, which was to be used universally in the Latin rite Church. Permission to celebrate the Tridentine Mass was therefore granted only on very narrow grounds. Then John Paul II, in response to continued demand for the Tridentine Mass, allowed diocesan bishops to grant permission—on the condition that it “be made publicly clear beyond all ambiguity that such priests and their respective faithful in no way share the positions of those who call into question the legitimacy and doctrinal exactitude of the Roman Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1970.”
Benedict XVI went much further. In Summorum Pontificum, his motu proprio of 2007, he defined the Tridentine liturgy as an extraordinary form of the Roman rite. Since then, any priest was free, without permission of the bishop, to use either the Roman Missal from 1962 or the Roman Missal from 1970; the faithful were free to choose either liturgy. Furthermore, they could request in their parishes that the Tridentine Mass be made available to them.
It is no wonder that the publication of Traditionis Custodes, Pope Francis’s motu proprio of 2021, came as a shock to many. In line with the teaching of Vatican II, Traditionis Custodes underlines that the Novus Ordo is “the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman rite.” Therefore, it severely restricts the use of the Tridentine Mass, especially taking care to ensure that it not be perceived as part of regular parish life and worship. The important requirement spelled out earlier by John Paul II is sustained: that those who participate in the Tridentine Mass “do not deny the validity and the legitimacy of the liturgical reform” decreed by Vatican II. Even those who agree with the theological content of Traditionis Custodes, however, criticize its lack of pastoral sensitivity toward those who for the last decade have been assured by Benedict XVI—and often by their bishops and pastors—of the legitimacy of their liturgical practice.
Unfortunately, the significance of Pope Francis’s Traditionis Custodes is also weakened by his own declarations in regard to Vatican II and the teaching of the previous popes. The exhortation Amoris Laetitia is often perceived as reversing the theological stance of John Paul II; it was accompanied by the quasi-liquidation of the John Paul II Institute in Rome and significant changes in teaching in the Pontifical Academy for Life. Documents such as Fiducia Supplicans, on blessing homosexual couples, as well as the critical remarks by Francis’s doctrinal chief concerning one of the most important documents of John Paul II’s pontificate, the encyclical Veritatis Splendor, add fuel to the fire. Sometimes, looking at the bibliographical references and footnotes in Pope Francis’s texts, one may get the impression that in his teaching he wants to bracket the achievements of the two previous popes and propose his own interpretation of Vatican II, different from the one proposed by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Certainly, these controversies over the correct interpretation of the last council make it difficult to resolve the dispute over the proper content of the liturgical reform and the validity of the Tridentine Mass. In the eyes of the ordinary faithful, they also undermine the authority of the Church’s Magisterium. Unfortunately, these controversies are far from over.
Before the controversies can be resolved, there are urgent things to be done. First, there is a need for catechesis on Vatican II—which, especially among young and committed Catholics, is at risk of becoming the “black legend” of modern ecclesiastical history. This catechesis should explain the main achievements and hopes of the last council in the most debated areas: ecclesiology, religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and ecumenical and religious dialogue. Only in this theological context can the principles of the liturgical reform become clear. Second, in dioceses, parishes, seminaries, monasteries, and various communities, a solid catechesis on the theology of the Eucharist is needed. This catechesis should concern the biblical sources of the Eucharist, its history and theology, as well as practical rules for celebrating and participating in it. Third, in the light of what has been said above about the theology of the Eucharist, integral and comprehensive care must be taken to ensure the quality of the celebration of Holy Mass. This includes the beauty of church decorations and liturgical vestments; the behavior of the priest and of all the people participating in the liturgy; and the content, quality, and beauty of the music.
The liturgy of the future must recover its sacramental, prayerful, and dignified character, which should primarily serve the vertical encounter between believers and God. As Benedict XVI taught, the whole of the liturgy should point to the beauty of the future world, material and spiritual, transformed by Christ’s grace. Therefore, the beauty of the liturgy should encompass the beauty of the external and internal architecture of churches and chapels, and the beauty of the liturgical music and its texts, as well as the whole of the celebration and preaching. From this point of view, the present heated debate between advocates of the old and new liturgies is secondary. Each of the rites can be trivialized and made superficial. And each can be celebrated in a way that serves the sacramental and transforming encounter with God.
Jarosław Kupczak, O.P., is Professor of Theological Anthropology at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Kraków.
Image by Vincent Delsuc, public domain. Image cropped.
