[Catholic Caucus] The Truce of ’68 Revisited

Crisis ^ | April 20, 2022 | Darrick Taylor

[ebb tide]

[Catholic Caucus] The Truce of ’68 Revisited

Twenty years ago, the writer George Weigel coined the phrase “the Truce of 1968” to describe the aftermath of the public dissent from Humanae Vitae, Paul VI’s encyclical reaffirming the Church’s teaching on contraception. In Weigel’s telling, the Church’s failure to publicly discipline the theologians who rejected Humanae Vitae (the Vatican allowed the priests who had dissented publicly to recant privately), taught Catholics that one could dissent without major repercussions and that the Vatican would not back those bishops who tried to enforce adherence to the encyclical.  

One could quibble with the word “truce” in Weigel’s metaphor, as one could say the Vatican’s actions look more like capitulation than a mutual cease fire, but otherwise it is a useful metaphor to describe the state of the Catholic Church as a whole since the 1960s. The warring factions in the Church galvanized over contraception, and this unspoken, or nearly unspoken, agreement not to escalate their disagreements on these issues any further is what has kept the Church from splintering in the intervening years. The operating principle of this unspoken agreement appears to be this: that there would be no crackdown on dissent from Church teaching, as long as one did not openly push for changes in controversial teachings, at least not too openly.

One part of this unspoken truce was a prohibition on criticism of Vatican II, or the reforms that followed it. You could do pretty much anything you wanted as a theologian after 1968, but you could not openly criticize Vatican II.

[ebb tide]

One part of this unspoken truce was a prohibition on criticism of Vatican II, or the reforms that followed it. You could do pretty much anything you wanted as a theologian after 1968, but you could not openly criticize Vatican II.

[ebb tide]

Ping

VC II: the root of all evil.