Vatican II Exhaustion? A Critique of the Traditionalist Critique
Part One: The “real people in the pews don’t care about Vatican II” argument.
What began as a slow drip from an annoying faucet has now evolved into a full blown leak requiring a response. And that has to do with this newfound narrative that “average people in the pews” are either blissfully uninterested in theological words such as the kind you find in Vatican II or they are simply exhausted by the entire topic and want the Church to stop talking about it. After all, here we are 61 years after the Council and even the so-called “experts” can’t seem to land upon a standard interpretation. So how can average Catholics be expected to pay attention to a Council that nobody seems to agree what it means?
Or something like that. The agitation expressed is real and can be sympathized with. But such statements also mask over what is little more than a jaded cynicism about the value of high level theological debates within the Church, and amount to a mere venting of the spleen in an anti-intellectual tonality. It is a darn good thing that theologians like Athanasius and Maximus the Confessor did not share such dispositions of dismissive disgust over highfalutin theology that “no real person” cares about. Otherwise, we might all be Arians or Monothelites right now. And the Trinity? As anyone who has ever had to teach the Trinity to students or preach about it from the pulpit can tell you, the Trinity would be one of the first doctrines tossed out the window if our pastoral methodological starting point is that our main metric must be “what real Catholics in the pews care about and understand”.
The claim will be made by the defenders of the Trad narrative that I am exaggerating and attacking a straw man. They will say that they are not encouraging people to ignore theology and to ignore the Council. They will say that they fully accept the Council and that there are things in it which will endure.
But I find such rejoinders to be disingenuous. I find such “defenses” to be mere butt-covering caveats so as not be accused of advocating apathy toward a Council. But when every word you write and post on social media gives a sympathetic reading to such apathy as the product of a flawed and ambiguous Council that nobody can agree upon, and when nothing you write is ever to elucidate and praise that part of the Council which you claim will “endure”, and when you never try to offer your own theological analysis of the Council but opt instead for a performative indifference toward it, then I think an objective observer could rightly conclude that you really do not like the Council and have no issue with those who choose to ignore it.
Along these lines, since when is some vague notion of “what real people care about” the primary metric for how theological discourse in the Church is to proceed pedagogically? It reminds me of when I was in 9th grade in my first algebra class and most students who were struggling with it were expressing that commonplace missive: “Why do we have to study algebra anyway? How does this have anything to do with real life?” I heard the same complaint in my physics class as students struggled to come up with the proper graphing of data points gleaned from the bad experiments they had set up. But then, of course, one could also extrapolate from that to apply such sentiments to **any** topic that was deemed difficult, boring, and that stretched the mind beyond the purely quotidian needs of the pragmatic moment.
Why have theology requirements at all in our Catholic universities? Or philosophy? I know from having taught theology to undergrads for 20 years, and to prep school students for four years before that, that there were never more than a small handful of students who were “into it”, with the vast majority secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) grumbling about what this had to do with “real life”. And they most certainly did not give a rat’s petard for whether the Mass should be in Latin or if we can save civilization by bringing Maniples back. Traditionalists complain that “nobody cares about Vatican II anymore” while seeming quite unaware that only a small niche market of ecclesial romantics care about their hobby horses either.
And while we are at it, why should we teach Chaucer or Dante or Shakespeare or pursue the very “impractical” liberal arts at all? I mean come on, “real people” have no interest in such things and are quite frankly exhausted by the multiplicity of literary, historical, and philosophical plurality of theories. Was Dante repudiating or embracing scholastic philosophy? Who cares? Well, apparently many Catholic school administrators agree that “no real person” cares, as we now see them desperately trying to bolster sagging enrollments by chucking out the window the liberal arts, since this is not what “real customers” want.
The Church has never taken it as a given that all ecumenical councils must be something of immediate and practical interest to the “average person in the pews”. The Church rather is preeminently concerned with the faithful exposition of Revelation and of its deep obligation to preserving the truth of that Revelation. For many centuries ecumenical councils were held in cultures where “average people” were illiterate and mostly peasants, many of whom may not even have known the name of their bishop or who the current pope was. Most of whom were also thoroughly untheological in their thought patterns and were blissfully unconcerned with such things in any way.
In fact, one of the catechetical and evangelizing functions of the Church is to try and get “average people” to care about spiritual things and, more importantly, to care about what it is that the Church teaches didactically about spiritual things. In other words, there is a pedagogical function of the Church that is not about sticking its nose into the wind to figure out which way the popular mind is blowing and to dumb things down accordingly. The Church’s pedagogy, no matter how pedestrian its starting point, aims high and asks people, like Christ, to “come up higher”.
There is, in other words, in the Church’s deep concern for theology, a certain amount of esotericism that is not only inevitable, but necessary. We are dealing with the deepest mysteries of all and yet somehow, according to recent Trad complaints, if a Council elicits heated debate, then it means the pragmatic target has been missed. But this is a kind of modernist nod toward a false egalitarianism that swims in the waters of a purely pragmatic calculus. There is an ineradicable elitism and esotericism in Christianity. And it is more radically egalitarian than anyone schooled by the French Revolution could concoct since it is an elitist esotericism that is offered as the birthright of all and the supernatural destiny of all, and the thrilling ride of theosis offered to all, and not just to the privileged illuminati of proper secular enlightenment.
This is why the “real people don’t care” argument is so retrograde and actually quite modernist in its denigration of robust theological debate in the Church as somehow a menacing carnival of confusion. Grow up. Sometimes adults are asked to do difficult things and one of the demands the Church asks of a baptized and confirmed adult Catholic is that he/she takes the time to be as educated in the intellectual side of the faith, as he/she is about all manner of other things. We live in the internet age where there are literally hundreds of reputable YouTube and other sources available , from Word on Fire to a podcast from Gaudiumetpess22.com, where theological education is available.
And is it not true as well that the emphasis upon a non-theological and purely devotional pedagogy is one of the reasons why the Church is bleeding out adherents? Because what inevitably happens in such a scenario is that educated adult Catholics compare their adult level knowledge of all manner of sophisticated topics, to that of an “Infant of Prague” devotional Catholicism fit for third graders and then conclude that the faith is indeed a fairy tale for little kids. And I like devotions and the Infant of Prague, but you get the point.
And I notice that Trads occupy this internet space as well, giving full evidence to the fact that they know that there are indeed many Catholics who do care about such things. And many of their blogs and podcasts dive deeply into theological topics that no “real person in the pews” cares about.
So, enough of this “real people are exhausted by Vatican II” rhetorical push. Because “average Catholics” are actually exhausted about many things, up to and including, debates about the liturgy, sexual morality, abortion politics, or even if the Catholic Church really is the one true Church. Therefore, in many ways, the Trad argument about ordinary people and their views on Vatican II proves too much and leaves us where we started.
Finally, on this point of “what real people think” I was unaware that these latest online Trads who are making such claims had been officially elevated by anyone into the spokespersons for “Everyman”, or when they had done the necessary sociological analysis to be able to speak on behalf of what it is the great masses of Catholics are thinking. And even if there is widespread apathy about the Council it does not prove anything that the Trads want it to prove. To wit, that this apathy is not only understandable, but praiseworthy, since it is an apathy born of a true insight that the Council was just a hot mess of ambiguities. Therefore, the entire “apathy of real people” argument is actually just a tiresome red herring meant as a mere adornment to make “pretty” that which is actually quite ugly: the rejection of key teachings of an ecumenical council as unworthy of our attention.
Part Two: “The Council ‘defined nothing’ and was merely pastoral” argument
This has now become so commonplace as a Trad talking point that it almost seems trite to comment upon it. First off, it is true that the Council issued no new dogmas. So I guess then that the whole thing was just a giant waste of time, right? After all, Councils are apparently only useful as definers of dogmas, right? But more sophisticated traditionalists will acknowledge that even a non-dogmatic and more pastoral council is still of a high authority. Indeed, many important councils in the Church’s history defined no new dogmas and yet were of immense importance.
Nevertheless, the constant references to the Council as *merely* pastoral are clearly designed to downgrade its importance by reducing it to a set of pragmatic and prudential texts which may have been pertinent and important to their cultural situation, but which are no longer binding now and is certainly out of date as a set of prudential judgements. The tiresome trope is that Vatican II was “your grandpa’s Council” but not yours since the issues it was addressing no longer pertain.
This is risibly wrong on so many levels one hardly knows where to begin. First off, you cannot define “pastoral” as reductive to “prudential and pragmatic”. Doctrinal and theological truths are also pastoral. Because truth is pastoral. The Church’s central message of salvation is pastoral. And the Church at Vatican II was well aware that there were negative pastoral downstream consequences of some really bad theologies that had infected the Church’s life. And it set about the task of reinvigorating a more robust and fulsome theology by moving beyond the straitjacket of manualist scholasticism and into a recovery of scripture and the Fathers.
Therefore, the Council did authoritatively propose theological propositions. And it did so with high authority in the two “Dogmatic Constitutions”, Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium. That is a very high authority indeed and thus, as Paul VI reiterated, the Council represents the highest authority of the Church’s Ordinary Magisterium. But in denigrating it as “merely” pastoral, the traditionalist narrative makes it seem as if the whole Council was devoted to mundane things like how to do potluck dinners after Mass or how large the font should be in parish bulletins to aid the visually impaired.
Therefore, in so denigrating the Council as an authoritative theological/pastoral project you end up with juvenile dismissals of the Council as a hopelessly out of date exercise in silliness. You can read all over social media that Vatican II was just a “boomer council for the Age of Aquarius that defined nothing and gave us nothing binding.” The overall tonality of the Trad narrative veers sharply in a strangely liberal direction wherein even an ecumenical council is treated as little more than a meeting of some “old dudes in Rome” whose opinions are of no more merit than the latest opinions of today.
The narrative also veers in a liberal direction insofar as it grounds its criticisms in the “lived experience” of average Catholics – a grounding which is then used, not as a pastoral jumping off point to do better, but as a real theological metric for determining whether the Council has any ongoing importance at all. This is where the cynical rejection of the absolutely central role of theologizing from the objectivity of Revelation gets us.
Finally, the further claim is made that even if the Council taught some theology with high authority, nevertheless, that which was taught was so riddled with ambiguities that short of some hoped for papal clarification that refusing to assent to them is thoroughly legitimate. This seems to be the view of the airport Bishop and Trad celebrity prelate, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, an auxiliary Bishop in Kazakhstan. And he has used this argument in order to justify the actions of the SSPX, all on the grounds that there are these “ambiguities”.
But this is abject nonsense and smacks of desperation. First off, the so-called ambiguities of Vatican II are nothing of the sort. What Bishop Schneider and his disciples are really saying is that they simply disagree with what the Council was clearly teaching on the grounds that it contradicts previous teachings. The only ambiguity for them, and what they really mean by “ambiguity”, is that the Council has created a certain level of cognitive dissonance insofar as its affirmations on religious freedom, collegiality, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, contradict previous Church teachings.
In other words, traditionalists like Schneider are quite clear that the Council is in fact quite clear. But since they see contradictions with past teaching in that very conciliar clarity, they affirm the right to dissent from it and do so on the grounds that nothing the Council taught is dogmatic and infallible anyway. Therefore, it is important here to see the theological linkage in the Trad narrative between the alleged “merely pastoral” nature of the Council, and the correlative view that the Council’s relationship with tradition is ambiguous and should be rejected, or at least modified to make it more palatable to traditionalist sensitivies.
And you know who agrees with this? The SSPX agrees with this. They do not mince words and do not hold that the Council taught things in ambiguous ways. Quite to the contrary, the SSPX affirms the deep clarity of the Council’s teaching but rejects them as errors. The teachings on religious freedom, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, and collegiality are all rejected by the SSPX. At least the SSPX has the virtue of honesty and does not engage in the interpretive play acting game of invoking the magical term “ambiguity” which allows them to pretend that they are accepting what they clearly are not.
Therefore, what one suspects is that what Athanasius Schneider calls “ambiguities” is just code for him to signal that he agrees with the SSPX but does not want to be so blunt and politically dangerous as to say along with them that Vatican II teaches error.
What *is* true is that the Council did teach things which involved some micro ruptures with past teachings of the Church. This is why Pope Benedict famously preferred the hermeneutic of “reform” rather than a hermeneutic of strict continuity. As he correctly points out, sometimes, in order to be faithful to central aspects of the tradition that have been occluded over the years by being crudded over with questionable theology, it is necessary to break from such micro distortions of the tradition that have crept into Church teaching. But these micro ruptures are in the service of a deeper and greater continuity with central aspects of the tradition.
Therefore, the cognitive dissonance issue is resolved if one moves beyond a slavish and wooden approach to all past magisterial documents and embraces the fact that the Church has herself articulated a doctrine of the tradition that allows for the fact that some formulations of Church teaching were flawed and in need of revision. And it is not so much that the teachings in question were in error, as it is that they engaged in a hypertrophy of one aspect of the tradition at the expense of a hypotrophy of others. And thus, a corrective was needed.
For example, it simply is not true that Vatican II invented out of whole cloth the doctrine of religious freedom. Nor is it true that prior to the Council there was no tradition of any kind emphasizing conscience rights in religious matters. And if one goes back to the Fathers, one finds a profound affirmation that true faith can never, ever be coerced. Faith must be a free act. And this is true even if the government is a Catholic confessional State. Nay, it is *especially* true if the government is a Catholic confessional State.
In his wonderful book, which I have cited often, “The Disputed Teachings of Vatican II, Msgr. Thomas Guarino notes these micro ruptures and says that Vatican II engaged in a kind of “masking” of those ruptures. This was done for largely pastoral reasons. The ruptures were real, but in Guarino’s expert analysis he finds that in all cases the ruptures were indeed justified precisely as a form of continuity! And that is the key point that differentiates such ruptures from the liberal theological project of just dissenting from all kinds of teachings on the grounds that this is a new and revolutionary era and the Church needs a great reset and a redo.
Guarino, along these same lines, also warns us against what he calls “infallibility bloat” and points out that not every teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium is infallible which means, in theory, that they are potentially changeable. To deny this would be to make every magisterial text an infallible text, which is absurd. But, and this is key, only the magisterium can make such adjudications and therefore when an ecumenical council makes some small changes to doctrine by way of development, this must be assented to.
Part Three: “The Council was not hijacked. What came after the Council is the fruit of the Council” argument
This is the more sophisticated argument from the traditionalist side insofar as the reception history of any Council should be viewed hermeneutically as deeply linked to the Council as such. This is why the typical conservative defense of the Council that states that the Council was just fine, but it was “hijacked” by the progressive wing of the Church and deliberately misinterpreted, rings hollow to so many. After all, the bishops who implemented the Council were just fresh from their participation in the Council. How could they have gotten it so wrong?
Even my friend, the Australian theologian Tracey Rowland, points out that how a Council is received and implemented cannot be neatly cordoned off from the Council itself. Why? Because any Council means more than it actually says and there is both a connotative and a denotative meaning to the conciliar words. And in the end, the later magisterial appropriation of the conciliar words becomes the true meaning of those words in any real sense.
All that said, I think it is very clear that the Council was indeed hijacked by progressive forces and deliberately misinterpreted. I further think that most of the bishops of the Council, when they got home, encountered an already in place theological propaganda machine in universities and religious houses of study that they simply lacked the ability to resist. It is hard to explain to younger Catholics from someone who lived through this period just how powerful the liberal theological forces were. Theological revolution was everywhere and it was in charge of important ecclesial institutions. They had used the three years of the Council to prepare for the coup, and when the Council ended, they were ready.
In other words, I agree that the reception history of a Council is of hermeneutical importance for interpreting the Council. But that historical analysis cannot just uncritically accept tout court any and all post-conciliar developments as of equal importance. It is necessary to ask the question of each development whether it really is faithful to the Council or whether it is engaging instead in an ideologically motivated distortion.
Conciliar reception history is one thing. But mendacious and deliberate distortion of a Council is also possible. In other words, it is not only possible, but probable, that Vatican II was hijacked. The neo-scholastics had been routed at the Council. The ressourcement theologians won the day but it was a pyrrhic victory. They were a minority in the theological guild despite their conciliar success and their numbers and their organization were lacking. They were no match for the liberal revolution, which is what led to such noteworthy ressourcement theologians as de Lubac, Ratzinger, Balthasar, Bouyer and others (e.g. the philosophers Maritain and Pieper) to bitterly lament this betrayal of the Council. This is why they founded the journal Communio.
This is why too Pope Benedict spoke of there being “two councils”. There was the real Council of the texts and the clear intent of the Council fathers, and then there was the “Council of the media” that actually won the day. The media Council was portrayed as a triumph of liberalization and an embracing of secularization. And that narrative stuck. Which meant that if you were, as I was, a young seminarian in the year 1978 you were in danger of being called “rigid” and kicked out of the seminary if you dared to question any of the liberalizing tendencies. Because, you were told, that is what Vatican II “was all about”.
What I remember therefore more than anything else was the mendacity. The deceptions. Which is why I refuse to buy into the “by your fruits you will know them” Trad critique of the Council. The full history of how the Council was derailed and deliberately falsified by people who had no issue with lying is still not emphasized enough. Which is also why I do not trust the current leaders of “synodality”. It strikes me as more of the same Potemkin Village deception. A stalking horse.
Returning then to traditionalists, you can see that they too have recourse to the “Vatican II was hijacked narrative” when it comes to the liturgy. They all love to point to the fact that the Novus Ordo has many elements that are not in sync with what Sacrosanctum Concilium actually teaches. And they are right about that. But they can’t have their cake and eat it too. You cannot express in one breath your total exasperation with the conservative narrative of a hijacked council and then turn around in the next breath and affirm precisely that reality in the example of the liturgy. In short, if the liturgical reform was hijacked then so any number of other key issues could also have been hijacked.
Conclusion
What prompted this revisiting of a tired old debate? Several things really, There is the ongoing situation with the SSPX, which makes these debates more than theoretical exercises in theological argumentation. This has real world consequences and it does us no good too ignore them. Second, the current Wednesday audiences of Pope Leo have been focusing on Vatican II and have reopened some old debates, especially with regard to liturgy. Third, and linked to the SSPX issue, there have been many, many social media posts from traditionalists who are not in the SSPX who have nevertheless expressed sympathy for them with regard to their negative assessment of Vatican II. And this is a worrisome emerging narrative and trend. Fourth, the many recent comments from Athanasius Schneider have gained a wide circulation and are in need of refutation, especially with regard to his reckless accusations that ressourcement thinkers like Henri de Lubac and Balthasar were “modernists”. Notice that he does not criticize Ratzinger in that regard. Even though Ratzinger is in that school of thought. Smart move by Schneider, but it also shows he is calculating. And not in a good way.
None of this implies that Vatican II did not have flaws. It did, and even its most devoted expositors have noted them. But all councils had flaws. Which is why sometimes a further council is needed in order to clarify matters. We saw this in the progression of Christological doctrine in the trajectory from Nicaea to Chalcedon.
And we saw this same kind of clarifying trajectory after Vatican II in the voluminous teachings of Pope John Paul II. Tellingly, John Paul too has come under withering criticism from many traditionalists who in my view proffer such critiques, not as a helpful and healthy engagement in real theological dialogue, but rather in order to undermine his papacy altogether. As the most authoritative papal expositor of Vatican II, if one can undermine his credibility, then by implication the credibility of the entire Council is also called into question.
Sadly, Pope Francis reempowered the liberal rupturist wing of the Church and interrupted the hermeneutical conciliar trajectory put in place by John Paul and Benedict. Pope Francis himself seems to have adhered to this proper trajectory. But in reempowering the gaggle of liberal pitchfork brigade revolutionaries, he did great damage to the conciliar project.
Hopefully, Pope Leo will set that right. Time will tell.
Dorothy Day, Servant of God, pray for us