Catholics and Modernity

Catholics and Modernity

In pursuit of the truth - cinops* be gone - Saturday, July 21, 2012

Preface: Without hesitation, George Weigel is the distinguished Catholic writer in America. For Catholics and Non-Catholics when George talks or writes, we listen. Here are excerpts from his article in the National Review, July 12/12. Here is where we are going!

“For it was Father Murphy who, covering the Second Vatican Council for the New Yorker under the pseudonym “Xavier Rynne,” concocted the cowboys-and Indians hermeneutic of all things Catholic that has plagued the mainstream media’s reporting and commentary on the Catholic Church for two generations: There are good-guy Catholics, known as “liberals” or “progressives,” who want to make the Church relevant to contemporary society and culture; and there are bad-guy Catholics, known as “conservatives” or “traditionalists,” who want to retreat into the catacombs of intransigence because of their inability to grasp or comprehend a modern (and, latterly, postmodern) world they regard with horror… [*Catholic-in-name-only-politicians]

“So Murphy/Rynne hit on a brilliant strategy, perfectly adapted to the Sixties and the middle years of Kennedy Camelot; treat Vatican II as a political contest between the forces of light and the forces of reaction; run everything and everybody at the council through those filters; and then watch readers acclaim, with one voice, “I get it!”…The same nonsense prevails throughout the rest of Europe, even as the European Catholicism that most enthusiastically embraced the “progressive” or “open Church” model shrinks into ecclesial and public inconsequence.

“The problem, of course, is the cowboys-Indians/left-right optic is incapable with the fact that the Catholic Church is about true-and-false, not liberal-and-conservative…And in a secularized culture in which “choice” is the one sacred word, a Church that its leadership teaches authoritatively is going to be easily portrayed as ham-handed, insensitive, and out of step…

“The perpetual distortion of the Rynne optic inevitably creates were on full display in a story in the July 11 Post about teachers at a Catholic Sunday school in the diocese of Arlington, Va., who had resigned rather than profess that they believed and would teach, what the Catholic Church believes and teaches…Pope John XXIII did open the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962 [to December 8, 1965]by appealing to history as the “teacher of life” and gently scolding the “prophets of gloom” who saw nothing but disaster in modernity….

“It is also true that elements of Rynne’s “good guy” faction then went more than a bit overboard, imagining Vatican II as a council of rupture with the past - a new starting point for the Church’s self-understanding and teaching, untethered to an authoritative tradition and taking its intellectual cues, … from the ambient public culture… some of Rynne’s good guys - including the present pope, [Benedict XVI], then a theological advisor to cardinal archbishop of Cologne - foresaw deep trouble and began to speak and write of Vatican II as a council that had to be understood in continuity with the past…

“The party of ultimate fungibility is dying in the Catholic Church… It has proven itself a pastoral failure in Europe…intellectually sterile throughout the developed world, where a younger generations of theologians is far more interested in exploring Catholic tradition than deconstructing it… This is not so much a matter of authority… it is a matter of doctrinal integrity, clear [Catholic] identity, and evangelical purpose… and form communities of decency and compassion in an increasingly hostile cultural environment…

George H. Kubeck-