In Ross Douthat’s telling, the Catholic Church is in existential peril. A war raging between liberal and conservative factions within the magisterium could lead to the unraveling of the 2,000-year-old institution.
The proximate cause is a disagreement over whether divorced and remarried Catholics may be readmitted to Communion without first getting an annulment. In To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, the New York Times columnist writes that there is a deeper question, however, “about the authority of Scripture generally, and whether the church’s past teachings on any moral issue can be considered permanently reliable, or whether all things Catholic are subject to Holy Spirit-driven change.” (Father Thomas Rausch’s review of the book can be found here.)
The permanence and constancy Douthat invokes to prove that the church’s teachings cannot be changed are also why she cannot be defeated.
Pope Francis’ goal of jettisoning legalistic interpretations of age-old strictures in favor of a more merciful, pastoral approach is being pursued, Douthat says, in the face of tenacious opposition from within the College of Cardinals and the larger body of Catholic faithful. Since many feel it is impossible for the church to openly flout her own doctrine on the nature of marriage, he calls this a “full-scale theological crisis” that may before long cause a rupture in the church.
But his apocalyptic outlook is misplaced. The permanence and constancy he invokes to prove that the church’s teachings cannot be changed are also why she cannot be defeated.
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Douthat brings a shrewd political observer’s eye to his discussion of the recent synods on the family. A liberal cabal, he writes, under marching orders of Pope Francis, machinated to loosen the church’s ban on the remarried receiving the Eucharist. They were rightly rebuffed by a critical mass of more tradition-minded cardinals, so the pope opened a loophole himself, via ambiguous language in “Amoris Laetitia,” which some onlookers have interpreted to mean that anyone who asks can and should be readmitted to Communion.
The book highlights two earlier instances when the church flirted with heresy. In one, “stubborn bishops and laypeople” beat back the Arian view that Jesus was less than fully divine. In the other, the Vatican crushed Jansenism, a philosophy holding that the human soul is utterly corrupt. In the first example, the more orthodox view triumphed against a group pushing a “common sense alternative” to a seemingly intractable mystery. (How can someone be at once God and man?) But in the second debate, the losers were the traditionalist camp, the old guard resisting a Jesuit movement they saw taking theology in a vacuous, feel-good direction.
Douthat wishes to decipher which will provide the template for the post-Pope Francis era. He analyzes the two modern factions’ strengths and weaknesses and games out scenarios based on questions such as how long the current pontiff will live and how many cardinals he will therefore be able to appoint.
Either way, he concludes, Pope Francis has put the church on a path to possible destruction. If he is succeeded by an orthodox pope who tries to turn back these efforts, it will spark among Francis’ followers “a series of rebellions that would leave Catholic institutions broken and bankrupt.” Meanwhile, if we continue in the direction pushed by Francis, “conservative resisters, like similarly situated believers in certain Protestant denominations, [will] either depart for some schismatic alternative or remain as an unhappy church-within-the-church.”
In Douthat’s view, the “resilience” of the church’s teaching on divorce, “its striking continuity from the first century to the twentieth, is also a study in what makes Catholicism’s claim to a unique authority seem plausible to many people, even in a disenchanted age.” I admit I am sympathetic to that argument. It is similar to the one that saved me from the siren’s call of secularism.
Like many—far too many—poorly catechized cradle Catholics, the drift began immediately upon my leaving home. I went away to college and stopped attending Mass. Precepts of the faith that I had never before questioned suddenly felt absurd, and I ceased identifying as a Christian. Much of what I saw happening around me seemed morally troubling, but without a story about good and evil in which to ground a worldview—a story about humanity’s longing for the first and its history of settling for the second nonetheless—I was helpless to say why.
I came to understand that the Holy Spirit is at work in the church, which possesses the keys to heaven and thus to the peace I sought.
“Humanae Vitae” brought me home. Its anticipation of the consequences of the birth control pill, particularly its erosion of the “reverence” due women by men, startlingly prefigured the toxic sexual culture that 50 years later exerted a relentless pull on my life. As Elizabeth Anscombe wrote, it is silliness to think the only arguments for living chastely are utilitarian. Yet I was gripped by the conviction that, in Anscombe’s words, “If Christian standards of chastity were widely observed”—and Christian teachings in other areas, as well—“the world would be enormously much happier.”
I came to understand that the Holy Spirit is at work in the church, which possesses the keys to heaven and thus to the peace I sought.
“There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years,” G. K. Chesterton wrote in Why I Am a Catholic. “Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them.”
Chesterton answered the implicit question in the title of that essay with four words: that Catholicism is true.
History suggests the church is stronger than Douthat thinks. For 2,000 years it has endured.
Douthat writes, “Catholicism cannot both be a ship of Theseus in which every single part can be replaced and also be the church founded by Jesus Christ, the embodiment of a perfect and eternal Godhood.” That Catholicism is true is why he is sure the church will break apart or wither away rather than let a pope change a core doctrine on marriage. And it is how I know he is wrong to be afraid.
History suggests the church is stronger than he thinks. For 2,000 years it has endured. Though the Holy See was often attended by all manner of appalling corruption and lechery, the church survived. Through invasion and persecution, schism and plague, it survived. Despite Arianism and Jansenism, and a Jesuit order mocked by Blaise Pascal for “telling men that they may frequent brothels so long as they have some vague intention of converting the fallen women therein” (and this was the winning side in that controversy!), it survived. Is this finally the crisis that will bring down what Archbishop Michael Sheehan in Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine called “a living miracle of God”?
Catholics need not cast about for an answer. “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,” said Jesus, “and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.”
We already know how the story ends: with Christ victorious. If any of Douthat’s worst fears come to pass, it will be because something in his conception of what Catholic doctrine requires is mistaken—or because everything we think we know about God’s power on earth is false.
“Often have her children heard the demons’ exultant cry that, at last, she was whelmed in the wave of death,” Archbishop Sheehan said of the church. “But the tempest passed, and day broke anew, and the eyes of man beheld her still firmly fixed as of old on the rock of Peter, triumphant amid the wreckage of her enemies.”
Douthat should look to the pope of his childhood and take comfort in the words for which St. John Paul II was known: Be not afraid. Do not be afraid.
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