The History of Twentieth-Century Catholicism

Yesterday I posted some thoughts about a recently published history of the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council.

A friend chided me for ending my analysis with what he took to be a dismissive parting shot that does to progressive Catholic theology what the progressives tend to do to the pre-Vatican II theology.

I wrote: “By my reckoning, the most fascinating and remarkable aspect of recent American Catholic history was both the sudden and powerful emergence of a progressive Catholic vision after Vatican II, and its equally sudden (and largely unexpected) collapse only a decade or two later. Who, for example, reads David Tracy anymore? Or even Karl Rahner?”

My friends reaction gave me pause. I hadn’t meant to dismiss David Tracy, and certainly not Karl Rahner, arguably the most influential Catholic theologian of the twentieth century.

In my conclusion, I had hoped to point to a historical fact, not make a polemical point. That fact is as follows.

In the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, many in the Catholic Church in Europe and North America thought that vast and fundamental changes were both necessary and possible. The Dutch bishops, for example, put out a new catechism that, as I recall, was largely cribbed from Rahner’s theology.

Nearly everybody felt as though the Church was being carried forward on an unstoppable wave of change, so much so that plenty of bishops and priests—who often worry a great deal about their careers and want to be on the winning side—supported or acquiesced to calls for change that they may have privately rejected. The symbolic high water mark of this sentiment was, perhaps, the Call to Action Conference in Detroit in 1976.

And then? For reasons that the academic guild, which is so thoroughly invested in a progressive, whiggish view of history, seems unwilling or unable to identify and discuss, the Church drew back, and her future now seems far, far more conservative (at many different levels) than anyone could have imagined in 1976.

Thus my reference to Rahner. Who would have imagined that only two or three decades after his near dominance of the Catholic theological imagination, hardly any graduate students today seem interested in Rahner? They want to write dissertations on Balthasar, St. Thomas, and Gregory of Nyssa.

Progressives invariable conjure up images of a Vatican conspiracy, as if the only forces pushing the Church in a conservative direction were a few old men in Rome. That’s a hopelessly facile fantasy, one designed to reassure progressives that “the people” are still with them.

But I don’t have a better explanation, at least not one I can confidently support with good historical analysis. So I can just offer a few thoughts.

Undoubtedly the equally surprising and unexpected emergence of a politically powerful conservative movement in America in 1980 (Reagan) is related to the trajectory of theology and practice in the Catholic Church. (And I should add that this secular history, like the history of the Church, has been largely ignored and mishandled by secular historians, who, like so many church historians, have difficulty digesting the fact that the forward progress of history didn’t turn out to be “progressive.”)

Also, there was something intellectually flawed in progressive theology, or at least intellectually unsatisfying. To often liberal Catholic rhetoric goes “meta” too quickly. Massa provides a good example, using “history” as an almost magical incantation. But faith draws power from the concreteness of biblical and liturgical language, which the progressives tended to transcend in their theologies. As progressive removed themselves from biblical and liturgical concreteness, their capacity to fire the religious imaginations of ordinary Catholics—which for a decade or two was very real—seems to have diminished.

In any event, I hope there is a bright young graduate student out there who wants to tackle the twentieth-century Catholic Church with a fresh mind. What a remarkable century!