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(photo: Hilary Thomas/flickr)
I have a simple message for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops: Remember Vatican II. I do. The documents of the Second Vatican Council, which was held between 1962 and 1965, were the text for my freshman theology class at Notre Dame in 1964, and I think they are still around here somewhere. Vatican II, convened by the Good Pope John XXIII, was a breath of fresh air in an institution frozen in time, controlled by a bunch of old Italian Cardinals.
In a blog post at the New York Review, Contraception’s Con Men, Garry Wills reminds those who have deliberately forgotten those documents that they are not the Church. The Church is the laity, the People of God. The bishops are the servants of the Church, meaning the laity, and the pope is the Servant of the Servants of God, meaning that the Pope is merely a servant with respect to the bishops.
Decisions about morality in everyday life do not come from the top down in the inverted hierarchy created by Vatican II. They come from the lived experience of the People of God, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Once the people make a decision about morality, the pope and the bishops are irrelevant.
The Good Pope John met an untimely end, and immediately the Italian cardinals began to bury Vatican II with him in the cellar at St. Peter’s Basilica. In 1968, Paul VI, who had participated in the Council, issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae, which overruled a study conference and restated the ban on contraception. Paul VI flouted the process of theological development described by Vatican II, apparently intending to restore the supremacy of the papacy. He said that every form of contraception was intrinsically disordered, which apparently means necessarily evil. This is section 13 of Humanae Vitae:
It is in fact justly observed that a conjugal act imposed upon one’s partner without regard for his or her condition and lawful desires is not a true act of love, and therefore denies an exigency of right moral order in the relationships between husband and wife. Likewise, if they consider the matter, they must admit that an act of mutual love, which is detrimental to the faculty of propagating life, which God the Creator of all, has implanted in it according to special laws, is in contradiction to both the divine plan, according to whose norm matrimony has been instituted, and the will of the Author of human life. To use this divine gift destroying, even if only partially, its meaning and its purpose is to contradict the nature both of man and of woman and of their most intimate relationship, and therefore it is to contradict also the plan of God and His will. On the other hand, to make use of the gift of conjugal love while respecting the laws of the generative process means to acknowledge oneself not to be the arbiter of the sources of human life, but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. In fact, just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, with particular reason, he has no such dominion over his generative faculties as such, because of their intrinsic ordination towards raising up life, of which God is the principle. “Human life is sacred,” Pope John XXIII recalled; “from its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God.”
Paul VI says that rape is immoral, so it follows that sex without risk of pregnancy is immoral, as anyone can see. This is not an interpretation of scripture. It is one man’s view of “special laws”, the purposes of humans, one’s control of one’s body, and the will of the Almighty. It is nothing more than a statement of the views of Paul VI concealed behind flowery words
Catholics are to see themselves as “… minister[s] of the design established by the Creator.” That denies our lived experience, and fails utterly to grasp the problems that we face in living, raising children, and simply trying to survive in an era of turbo-charged capitalism. Practically all Catholics have refused to bow to the old celibates who have climbed to the heights of the Catholic hierarchy, and who have lost touch with the life struggles of the People of God.
The hierarchy has been unable to force adherence to the views of this encyclical. Many of us come from families that have been Catholic for centuries. The arrogance and the foolishness of this imperious demand encouraged millions to examine other teachings, and eventually to leave the faith of our ancestors.
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I remember both Paul and John, and that damned Humanae Vitae. I left the church shortly after.
With all the contraception fighting with respect to women, I see/hear no mention of vasectomy. Maybe that ok, I suppose since it happens to men!
Looks like it’s just you and me, masaccio. Must be ho-hum on steroids!
One would expect to see individuals fleeing “the church” (whatever that church may be), abandoning religion, but retaining faith and/or spirituality that reflects one’s personal experience/relationship with a higher authority.
Seems to me (IMNSVHO) that the idea of the “papal infallibility‘ is pretty much as much useless nonsense as the divine rights of kings is.
More old men talking to other old men.
I’ve been through several iterations of that.
Nice to see a post with a happy ending!
Yogi Berra had something to say about that.
And who but a yogi would!
The suggestion that the people can determine the terms of a religion smacks of the dreaded ‘human secularism’ and is to be avoided by all costs by the people actually managing the religion, just as democracy is to be avoided by those managing civic affairs.
If the institution fails thereby, and people leave it, is not of consequence to those causing the failure. It’s The Iron Law Of Institutions:
Common people, these controllers posit, are not capable of figuring out complicated subjects like theology, foreign affairs, etc. It takes self-identified experts to know what a god wants and what the country requires. Common people are lacking in that regard, the story goes.
So we see civic affairs and church affairs with common themes like obeyance which is why they work so well together, for the institutions and against people.
interesting wiki article. Jesuits taught me there was only one instance of an “infallible” pronouncement. But the Jesuits sometimes have a different take on things.
If I had to pick an order to which I would connect, it would be the Jesuits. One Jesuit, Anthony de Mello, is a case in point. Even the “Powers that be” could not silence him and his work is still honored (well, sort of!) by others in the Church.
Really good post, masaccio – I remember these events as they unfolded. It seems that not only all of our public systems are in failure and completely out of touch with the lives of every day people, but so too has this “illness” struck deep into the religious systems. In fact, wherever one casts one’s eye, every system, nested within the larger system that is our way of doing things, seems to be failing miserably. And in each of these systems, those in control are dancing as fast as they can to maintain that which gives them power. It is a quite a show. I have stocked up on my popcorn supplies, however, for none of this dancing by any who are trying so hard to keep themselves and their system in power will make one iota of difference. Too many of the people are refusing to play by the old rules, whether they are the practicing Catholics who secretly use contraception, and abortion, or they are those marching and chanting in our streets. It is we – the people – who have changed, and thus it will be we – the people – that will change these systems.
good teachers. glad i had ‘em. HS + college
I read somewhere that after the First Vatican Council (which declared the Pope infallible), adjourned, a horrendous thunderstorm swept through Vatican City.
God waited too long!
I too left the Catholic Church as a result of Humanae Vitae. After 12 years of a wonderful Catholic school education for which I am grateful every day, I finally became fed up one Sunday morning. Listening to a parish priest rant on and on about birth control, while we all sat within a lily-white congregation in a very segregated Brooklyn neighborhood, that the Church actively enabled to stay that way, was the last straw for me.
I continued to go to church for a few more months while I lived under my parents roof but when I moved to California, the Catholic Church and I were done.
It still saddens me to watch the continued conservative backlash to Vatican II. Millions of liberal Catholics left with Paul VI and especially John Paul II.
The current generation of cardinals considers Vatican II and the radicalism of John XXIII to have been a bullet that the Church dodged (through the intervention of the Holy Spirit, of course). Some of them take pride in their participation in the efforts to restore sanity, while others like (now Pope) Ratzinger went with the flow. He was liberal during Vatican II and became conservative, when it became clear that the conservatives were winning.
Good post, masaccio. Was raised Catholic and went to mass regularly for the first 24 years of my life, not so much afterward, and even less after the expose’ of the child-abuse cover-up. But never subscribed to the church’s official positions on contraception and abortion, IMO that is an individual decision. That is between men and women and their maker.
I was gonna say something about my personal history, which I tell everyone offline. But then I remembered all those Jesuit hit men sent from Rome in the 1530s to deal with The Tudors, and I had second thoughts.
But thank you, masaccio, for having the guts to dig into this so deeply. I, too, remember Vatican II, and let me just say it has all been downhill since then.
I started falling out of love with the Catholic Church as a young adult. In order for my devout mother to recieve sacrament she would have had to anull her 13 year marriage to my father(he was abusive so she would have had grounds.) However, she chose not to because her thinking was that to deny the marriage would be to deny the good that she felt came from the marriage as well(my brother and I.) Forgiveness is a large tenet of my faith. I could not reconcile that God sanctioned a bunch of old men looking down on my mother’s decision to end the marriage and that He would have withheld anything, sacrament or otherwise, as a result of her decision.
It would be the first of many disagreements I would have with Catholic doctrines.
Excellent post. One thing that you do not mention needs a little emphasis though: Vatican II was not a novelty, if we look at the history of the Church. The novelty is the whole concept of Papal supremacy–it only dates back to 1870 and the Pope’s frantic attempts to prolong Austrian-style absolutism in Italy. For 1800 years, the Pope was, religiously, merely the well-respected final arbiter of doctrinal disputes in Western Christendom. It was only when Italian independence took away the Pope’s petty principality in central Italy that the Piuses, IX through XII (all of whom the current Vatican is fast tracking for sainthood), suddenly invented this claimed imperial power over the consciences of Catholics.
Thirty-two years ago, when the priest that was to marry me started in on the “Holy Father’s” orders re birth-control, I silenced him with a Church maxim that goes back at least to the 12th century: “Vox populi, vox dei est”, “the voice of the people is the voice of God”. He was well-educated and knew he had nothing to say in reply.
I was at a catholic college during Vatican II, and hopeful. Somewhat later I became what I call a ‘driven-away catholic’. Fortunately I have not encountered a bishop in person since, so have never been arraigned for assault.
While I have some issues with Humanae Vitae, I have found through my 50 some years that I love my Catholic Church and faith more and more. As for as the teaching on abortion, I find the Church teaching to be undoubtably correct. The voice of the people is not always correct. The culture should never be the final arbiter on church teaching or truth.
There is much to love about the Church, but the laity and a few religious are the source of those things worth loving. I never learned anything from any of those who climb the hierarchy that was worth remembering.
Rome has tried to bury Vatican II because its major aim was “collegiality.” Returning power and choice back to the bishops and laity. Naturally, the Curia and Pope couldn’t allow that to happen.
John Paul II appointed bishops as dictatorial and dogmatic as he was, and Benedict has done the same. Unless another John XXIII sneaks in, it’ll be another 50yrs before the Church — the people — has a chance of taking it back. Curse these guys, their deafness, their callousness, and their cowardice in protecting priests over children has stripped away any moral authority.
I once listened in awe as two dissident Catholics discussed the emergence of Pope John Paul II. I was dumbfounded by their belief that the reactionaries in the Church assassinated Pope John Paul I. Why did the reactionaries assassinate John Paul I? Because that Pope John Paul intended to reinvigorate the spirit of the Second Vatican Council!
Eventually, I watched the Godfather, III, and became aware of the financial scandals within and around the Vatican. The celebrated John Paul II was certainly and enemy of the poor. And the Church has scarred more than a few children put into its care. So, why not murder a Pope, especially when vast sums of money are at stake.