Crisis in the Church: A Historical Perspective Address delivered by Professor Roberto de Mattei Una Voce Canada Annual General Meeting Holy Family Parish, Vancouver, British Columbia November 10, 2018 The Century of Revolutions The Church is the Mystical Body of Christ: a reality that transcends history, but in history lives and battles and hence is called the Church Militant. For this reason we cannot speak about the Church without reflecting on the historical horizon in which She operates. In 2017, we commemorated three Revolutions which changed [the course of] history: the Protestant Revolution, the French Revolution and the Communist Revolution. Three Revolutions that are part of a single revolutionary process.1 2018 is the anniversary of two events positioned inside the same revolutionary process: the hundred years since the end of the First World War and the fifty years since the Revolution of 1968. Two anniversaries that help us to place the crisis of the Church in its historical context. The First World War shook up the political geography of Europe. The disappearance of the Austrian Empire deprived the European continent of its centre of gravity, paving the way for the Second World War. But the postwar period of the early 20th century was principally a Revolution in the culture and mentality of European man. It was the end of an era. We ought to reread the memoirs of the Austrian writer Stefen Zweig (1881- 1942), Die Welt von Gestern (The world of yesterday). Zweig writes in this book: “If I try to come up with a convenient formula to describe the time preceding the First World War – the period I grew up in – I believe the most concise possible would be to say that it was the age of certainty. In our almost millenary, Austrian Monarchy everything seemed to be eternal and the State itself appeared to be the supreme guarantee of this continuity. (…) Everything in the solid Empire appeared to be sound and immovable and in the highest position there was the venerable old Sovereign; (…). No one was thinking about wars, revolutions and upheavals. Any radical act, any violence, appeared then to be impossible in the age of reason”2. Everything appeared eternal, sound, immovable. However, behind those stable and apparently indestructible institutions, on which society was based, from the family to the Monarchy, there was a conception of the world founded upon an order 1 Cf. PLINIO CORREA DE OLIVEIRA, Rivoluzione e Contro-Rivoluzione, Sugarco, Milan 2009. 2 STEFAN ZWEIG, Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europaers, tr. it. Il mondo di ieri, Arnoldo Mondadori, Milan 1994, pp. 9, 27-28. 1 of unchangeable values. The guardian of these absolute values, was, and still is, the Catholic Church. Stability, order, equilibrium are all good things, but there is not one good thing in this world that doesn’t come from the Church, the only Divine and always perfect institution, no matter how imperfect the men who represent Her can be. On the eve of the First World War, the men who were at the helm of the Barque of Peter were two saints: Pius X and his Secretary of State, Rafael Merry del Val. St Pius X died a month after the start of the War and understood its catastrophic significance. During the First World War the Russian Revolution broke out. It was the matrix for all the other social and political revolutions that came after. The totalitarianisms of the 20th century destroyed the old order, but they didn’t build a new order. The essence of totalitarianism is not the hypertrophy of the State, as many believe, but the destruction of the natural, social order. Totalitarianism dissolves, in effect, all principles and institutions and renders man destitute of any social protection - to achieve the dictatorship of chaos. Political, intellectual and moral disorder was the common thread of the 20th century - the century of revolutions, world wars and genocides. The bloodiest century in Western history.3 The Sixty-Eight revolution was a Revolution that didn’t shed blood like those previously, but it shed something much worse: it shed the tears of a generation that didn’t only lose their bodies but lost also their souls. Sixty-Eight was the most devastating of all the preceding Revolutions because it enthroned chaos in the everyday life of Western man. From a fluid society to a fluid Church Sociologists like Zygmunt Baumann, in defining our age spoke of a “fluid society” in which all forms are dissolved, even basic ones of social aggregation. The “fluid life” that Baumann writes about is the precarious and ephemeral life of modern man: a life devoid of roots and foundations, as he lives only for the present, immersed in the liquefaction of all values and institutions. Everything that is liquidated, is consumed, or, we might say, everything that is consumed, is liquidated: from food products to individual lives.4 Everything is fluid, since everything changes, everything is in a state of becoming. In philosophical terms we might define our society as based on the triumph of pure becoming, the most radical negation of the primacy of Being that has ever existed in history. The fluid society cannot be compared to a river that flows, since the river comes from a living source and has a destination: the immense sea that awaits it. The fluid society has no destination: it just erodes the rock. Yet it only erodes the surfaces, dissolves the incrustations and everything is transformed into mud. Rock in its essence is indestructible. Nothing can be done against the force of being. 3 ROBERT CONQUEST, Reflections on a ravaged Century, W. W. Norton & Company, New York 2001. 4 ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, La vita liquida, tr. it. Laterza, Rome 2006, p. IX. 2 The first name of God is Being, as God Himself revealed to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3, 14). All the divine attributes flow from this Being as from a primordial spring. Every perfection in reality comes down to a grade of being which refers back to an absolute Being, without limit and without conditions. This philosophical primacy of Being has been taught by the Church ever since its birth. The Church has a doctrine and a law which is absolute and immutable and reflects the eternal law, which is God. This law and this doctrine are contained in Holy Scripture and in Tradition; the role of the Magisterium is to preserve it and to hand it on. Not one iota of these principles can be changed. Of course, throughout history, Christians may have distanced themselves from the truth and from the precepts of the Church in their personal lives. These are the epochs of decadence which demand a profound reform, i.e. a return to observance of abandoned principles. If this does not happen, then the temptation is to transform the immoral behaviour into principles which are opposed to Christian truths. This temptation penetrated the Church during the Second Vatican Council and is now proposed to us via the concept of the primacy of pastoral practice. The Spirit of the Second Vatican Council The Second Vatican Council was a cultural Revolution which preceded that of ’68. The slogan which sums up the spirit of ’68 is “It is forbidden to forbid” (Il est interdit d’interdire), which means: “it is forbidden to affirm”. Every affirmation, in effect, if it is clear, firm and categorical, entails the negation of the opposite affirmation. To forbid to forbid means that there are no categorical affirmations, absolute rules nor non-negotiable principles. Man does not act by following rules, but by obeying impulses, sentiments and desires. This idea was formulated for the first time by John XXIII in his allocution which opened Vatican II on 11 October 1962. Pope John explained that the Council had been launched not to condemn errors or formulate new dogmas, but rather to propose, with language adapted to new times, the perennial teaching of the Church.5 We are told that Church doctrine does not change but only the way in which this doctrine is communicated. What actually happened was that the primacy attributed to the pastoral dimension effected a revolution in language, in mentality and in the life of the Church. The slogan of the Second Vatican Council was: it is forbidden to condemn, since condemnation is a negative attitude, which results in aggressive reactions in the one that is being condemned. It is forbidden to condemn means that there is no need to fight evil or else evil will fight us. A slogan that anticipated, not followed Vatican II. According to the progressive theologians, the cause for the rejection of the Church and anticlericalism of the 19th and 20th centuries was in the intolerant attitude that the Church had against Her enemies. The transition to a new kind of pastoral care 5 JOHN XXIII, Allocution Gaudet Mater Ecclesiae of 11 October 1962, in AAS, 54 (1962), p. 792. 3 would appease enemies, and would open up a new era of peace and collaboration with the Church. The appeasing coexistence, Ostpolitik, the historical compromise and today’s agreement with Communist China, originate from this pastoral Revolution. The outcome, nonetheless, was not a decrease but an exponential increase of anti- Christianity in the world. The Church, in Her visible structures, lost Her militant identity and has been liquefied. Pastoral care is that which through updating. is modified and transformed continuously. The primacy of the pastoral signifies a fluidization of the principles and institutions of the Church. The solid, permanent Church with a backbone has been replaced by a “fluid” Church, like the society in which we live.