Catholicism in Crisis

In 1949, Evelyn Waugh wrote an article for Life magazine entitled “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church.” Catholicism was an “essential part” of the American spirit, he wrote, and America was where the church would flourish. As the scandals of 2002 unfolded, I found myself wondering how Waugh would have reacted. He could hardly have known that 1949 would prove to be a high point for the church in America. There has been nothing but decline since. Waugh died in 1966, so he lived long enough to see the penumbras and emanations from the Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965: the spirit of renewal, the opening to the modern world, the fantasies of ecumenism. They filled him with dread.

The decline of the church since the council seems to be a case of propter hoc, not merely post hoc. It is often said that a comparable disarray followed earlier councils. I have my doubts. Harry Crocker, the author of Triumph, an excellent one-volume history of the Catholic Church, says that “the First Vatican Council [1869-70] did not lead to any comparable turmoil, nor did the Council of Trent [1545-63].”

I put the same question to Chris Ferrara, the author (with Thomas E. Woods, Jr.) of a remarkable book, just out, called The Great Facade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church. “They have it backwards,” Ferrara said. Earlier councils were called to address disciplinary or doctrinal crises that had already arisen. Vatican II, on the other hand, was called “for no good reason, since by all contemporaneous accounts the church was in fine fettle in 1962.” Pope John XXIII on summoning the council that the church was witnessing “the rise and growth of the immense energies and of the apostolate of prayer, of action in all fields.” Conversions, baptisms, and vocations were all rising. All these declined after Vatican II and have not ceased doing so.

In November I went to Indiana to see Ralph McInerny at Notre Dame. A professor of philosophy, he has taught at the university since 1955 and is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center. He has written “over a hundred” books, but is not sure of the exact number. Amazon listed 115 when he last looked. Many of them are mysteries, some set at Notre Dame. Apparently he can write a book in two or three months. With a growing family in the 1950s, he learned how to write in order to augment his salary. He would read writer’s Digest and contributed to magazines like Redbook and McCall’s. Today I regard him as the number-one Catholic writer in America.

He looks a bit like Kirk Douglas. When I asked him what he made of the prolonged turmoil in the Church, he said: “I don’t think we can understand – maybe we are not meant to understand – the real providential meaning of these thirty-five or forty years. But it is clearly the worst time that the church has ever gone through. Ever. I really do think that. It’s certainly worse than the Reformation, when people knew when they had ceased to be Catholic, and acknowledged it. Cardinal Newman in The Idea of a University has a section on the “Infidelity of the Day.”” He contrasts the nineteenth century and the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century all the foes of the faith were outside the church, arrayed against it. In the Middle Ages you had foes within the church – heretics who claimed to be Catholics. Well, I have often thought that we have the worst of both worlds. Enemies within and enemies without.”

What had happened after previous councils? McInerny said he was no historian, but he doubted that the old cliche; was correct: “The Council at Lyon in 1274 – to which Thomas Aquinas was traveling when he died – left no mess in its wake that I know of. Councils have been called because there was a mess. Vatican II was called because there wasn’t one, as John XXIII more or less said in his opening remarks. All the trouble came afterward.”

McInerny expressed some frustration that the dissenting theologian Richard McBrien has almost become the public voice of Notre Dame: forever on TV, clerically garbed for the cameras. But he had kind words for Theodore Hesburgh, the emeritus president, who over many years contributed greatly to Notre Dame’s material success. (He also hired McBrien.)

McInerny took me to see Hesburgh the next eay. He has an office on the top floor of the library that is named after him. Now eighty-six, he sat like an old bulldog behind his desk, wearing black clericals and a woolen cardigan. He told me that for his office he had wanted floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a view of the campus. The gave him that. But he is going blind and can no longer read the books. There was a huge television set and a white circular carpet, emblazoned with university insignia.

I asked Father Hesburgh what was his major concern about the future of Notre Dame. “That is might not be Catholic enough,” he quickly replied. It was a “constant struggle, swimming upstream all the way.” McInerny said he was grateful to Hesburgh for saving him from faculty enemies. Hesburgh is a “liberal who means it”; he doesn’t mind having around him people he disagrees with. Hesburgh said that such disagreements are central to the mission of a university. When we left, Hesburgh asked us to pray for him.

McInerny’s comment on the post-Vatican II decades may seem extreme (it may also be correct), but it is widely accepted that 2002 was the worst time ever for the church in America. In remarks at the Faith and Reason Institute, the papal biographer George Weigel said that when he was in Rome last April, “high officials” there had no idea that a serious crisis was brewing. He felt he was in a time warp. The “information flow” was not in fact flowing. “It seems that there was no significant, ongoing reporting, through the Vatican embassy here in Washington, to the appropriate authorities in the Holy See,” Weigel said.

In all the massive coverage of the church scandals, little attention has been paid to the role of the papal nuncio – the pope’s ambassador in Washington, currently Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo. A senior member of the diplomatic corps, with a mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, he is said to be unreachable by telephone. The problem is that ambassadors today are vestigial organs of the body politic. In the days of sail, when messages took weeks to deliver, they exercised real power. Decisions were sometimes needed without waiting for instructions from the sovereign. Technology has changed all that. “The media,” broadly construed, have taken over many aspects of the “information flow.”

Having lost secular power, the Vatican hangs on to its world-wide web of diplomats. Absent force, everything must be negotiated. Ambitious church functionaries are eager for these diplomatic posts, especially in Washington, where ruffles and flourishes maintain the illusion of worldly power. Meanwhile, they retain the incentives of bureaucrats everywhere. They don’t want to hear bad news from subordinates or to pass it on to superiors. The nuncio in Washington is customarily in his final post before returning to Rome, where he may expect to be rewarded with a cardinal’s hat. So he distances himself from all controversy. And he maintains good relations with the natives – which is to say, the Church’s American Hierarchy. (One can almost hear the nuncio musing: “They send so much money to Rome . . . Let them do it their way. Father Murphy is their candidate for bishop? That can be arranged . . . .”)

I knew of three cases where priests in the United States, or secular groups, tried to do something about a local bishop who was engaging in homosexual activity. In Illinois, priests put themselves in jeopardy by signing letters of complaint sent to the nuncio in Washington. That was Montalvo’s predecessor. Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan. His reponse was to send the material straight back to the bishop. (“This is what they are saying about you and here are their names.”) No scandal would erupt on his watch! Cacciavillan is now a cardinal. More recently, a group of priests tried to inform the current nuncio about a corrupt bishop in New Jersey. They could never get Montalvo on the phone. “He knew that if we told him in person he would have to do something about it,” one of the priests told me. Eventually the official channels were bypassed and the information was sent directly to allies in Rome.

“I think it is fair to say that the senior officials of the Catholic Church had too positive a view of the church in the United States,” George Weigel said in his talk in Washington. “Therefore they were unprepared for these revelations of malfeasance and misgovernance.” After years in Rome working on John Paul II’s biography, Weigel saw that “the senior leadership” had formed the view “that things were in rather good shape here.” One can see why. The information wasn’t reaching the top. But in 2002 new channels of communications were opened. The information came flooding in, not from the nuncio, but from the Boston Globe, the New York Times, and a hundred other sources. One wonders wheter the nuncio will get his red hat this time.

Both the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Jim Nicholson, and Archbishop Montalvo were present at the John Carroll Society’s Epiphany Mass, with brunch to follow at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. Montalvo, Nicholson, and the Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, sat at the same table. In his speech, Nicholson extolled the industrious pope and the Holy See’s 174 diplomatic missions, pros in their field, who concentrate on “classic diplomacy.”

McCarrick leaped to the podium and said a few kind words about the nuncio, “an extraordinary diplomat.” Belgrade had been an earlier posting, so “he gets the spots that are . . . interesting,” McCarrick said, pausing artfully. Subdued mirth from the audience of 300. Montalvo, bespectacled and seventy-three, preserved diplomatic inscrutability. “Because these have been tough times for the Church,” McCarrick continued. “and for us bishops the nuncio has been a great support and source of brotherly care.”

Here was solidarity between bishop and bishop. And no doubt Montalvo had indeed been a “great support,” in stanching the information flow, for a while at least.

So, the church is not in good shape, and the pope didn’t know the half of it? That may be true, or part of the truth. But the pope surely could have found out what was going on, if he had really wanted to. But I think he didn’t. Perhaps the unpleasant facts that have emerged, and of which he had earlier been warned, stood in too great a contrast with the optimism about the world that seems to have been the guiding spirit both of the Second Vatican Council and of John Paul II’s papacy.

Very good article. The nuncios have been a problem for some time, I think. I can't remember who was in charge under Paul VI, but I recall reading that he had a lot to do with keeping things from the Pope.

I'm sure they all do. Still, the Pope must have news services and people who analyze the news, and I can't believe any pope could have been completely ignorant of what's going on here or anywhere in the world. This is particularly so in the case of JPII, whose staff has the entire internet at their fingertips.

What a disjointed mess these ruminations are!

In addition, Bethell scrapes the bottom of the barrel by seeking out Chris Ferrara, who hates John Paul II's guts.

Who give's a rat's butt what Ferrara or the the schismatic Thomas Woods thinks?

Bethell's also being disingenuous. The Pope had been informed, in 1984, of the extent of the problem by Fr. Thomas Doyle, who was kicked off the episcopal merry go-round for his efforts.

Moving pederasts around was the policy of the Church; similiar actions were taken in France and Poland.

Don't kind yourself: the Pope knew.

I am always very wary of anything Tom Bethell says, because of his role in the JFK assassination cover-up. He was a mole for somebody (CIA? Naval Intel? British Intel?) as a youth in Jim Garrison's office. He leaked info to the press, passed files on to Clay Shaw's attorneys, and since then has been a one-man "Oswald acted alone" disinformation campaign in the guise of being a "Garrison insider."

. . . whose staff has the entire internet at their fingertips.

Well, yes, his staff. I don't know, but I rather suspect the Pope himself puts more of his time into meditation and prayer and travel (and, given his age and health, suffering) than into surfing the web. Bureaucracies are usually devoted to self-preservation rather than to whatever their original purpose. Did you note the thread started by American Colleen, Not for the Sake of the Kingdom? Related theme.

I don't buy it. It is true the information flow was bad. But scandals erupted in Europe and the US long before 2002. In Europe cardinals and bishops were being exposed as corrupt throughout the early 90s. In the US and Canada enormous scandals erupted in the early 80s. In 1989 a Bishops' Conference was assembled specifically to deal with pedophilia--could the Vatican not have known about this? Scandals broke out in Ireland, Canada, France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Australia. Homosexuality had already become systemic. In '89 in the US alone more than 300 cases were known and written about in the secular press. By 1992 the number rose to more that 400 and inspired a feature article on pedophila in the Catholic Church by Newsweek, a major secular publication. On the diocesan level hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements were being paid out to victims. Elsewhere whole religious orders were becoming exclusively gay. How could Rome not have known aboout any of this? It stretches credulity. The scandals were worldwide and involved more than a billion dollars. But even if we grant such self-imposed ignorance--how can the Pope be forgiven his dereliction? His primary job was to protect the faith by being vigilant.

Yes, they are disjointed -- I said in my comment they constituted a reflection and not an analysis. Actually, that's where I still am -- reading and wondering and not coming to conclusions.

About Ferrara and Woods, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to enlighten me. I never heard of either.

Bethell's also being disingenuous. The Pope had been informed, in 1984, of the extent of the problem by Fr. Thomas Doyle, who was kicked off the episcopal merry go-round for his efforts.

I pinged saradippity to this because I think she had some comments on the Doyle report (which I never read but have heard of -- often); I don't remember the specifics that she brought up. I did hear that the report had been distributed to the American bishops, but that's all I've heard about its distribution.

Moving pederasts around was the policy of the Church; similiar actions were taken in France and Poland.

The "policy of the Church" or the policy of bishops acting on their own (to whatever conspiratorial ends and with whatever "one hand washes the other" justification)? I don't know -- you may be right; but a church that has such a policy is rather a sorry excuse for a church.

Don't kid yourself: the Pope knew.

Again, you may be right. I hope not -- or at least not in the sense you seem to mean.

I am always very wary of anything Tom Bethell says, because of his role in the JFK assassination cover-up.

This I never heard of. In any case, it was forty years ago. I've liked his work in The American Spectator, but that's as long as I've known it, and it hasn't been around 40 years. Has he really done anything recently on JFK?

Most of what you say, I didn't know about. I guess I heard -- vaguely -- some of it. Granted, I'm not the Pope -- I have to make a humdrum living, shop, launder, clean, etc. for myself, read a bit (or a lot) on not necessarily church-related subjects, and deal with personal crises (which have been arising with distressing frequency). But I also don't know what other crises the Pope was dealing with.

I don't mean to sound as if I'm trivializing this whole awful scandal. It utterly and truly breaks my heart. But, as I said on an earlier post, I don't know. I read what I see and try to put it together in my mind. But there are too many missing pieces, and I still don't know how it could have happened -- I can't think it would have if the nun who was the principal of my high school in the 60's had been in charge!

I did hear that the report had been distributed to the American bishops, but that's all I've heard about its distribution.

This is not about the report to the bishops. Doyle was secretary to the Bishops' Conference, and knew all the dirt, especially about the burgeoning sexual abuse scandal. He has said he informed Rome of every case that came to his attention.

Doyle, on his way to the episcopate, was derailed because he stood up to the bishops by writing and publishing a report on the extent of sexual abuse by priests.

Since then, Doyle has testified in dozens of sexual abuse cases, always against the Church in favor of the abused.

He devastated the Diocese of Dallas with his testimony in the Rudy Kos case.

He has said he informed Rome of every case that came to his attention.

OK -- he informed Rome. But it seems to me that there's been lots on FR about the Curia keeping things from the Pope. (You accuse -- was it Ferrara? of hating the Pope -- I'm trying to make excuses for him -- maybe only because he looks a lot like my Lithuanian grandfather).

He was on his way to the episcopate, was derailed because he stood up to the bishops by writing and publishing a report on the extent of sexual abuse by priests.

Since then, Doyle has testified in dozens of sexual abuse cases, always against the Church in favor of the abused.

As far as I know, Doyle has done yeoman service in this awful matter, and I applaud him for it.

I did ask you for more info on Ferrara and Woods, since I am utterly ignorant of them.

(Didn't mean to sound nasty, but I'm up past my bedtime.)

But it is clearly the worst time that the church has ever gone through.

A rather bold statement considering all the Church has been through in 2000 years.

Let us not forget Our Lord's promise in Matt 16:18:

"And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I shall build my Church; and the powers of death shall not prevail against it."

The Catholic Church will prevail.

As for the Church in America....

A rather bold statement considering all the Church has been through in 2000 years.

Not really. Even the Arian heretics could not find support for their teachings in any interpretation the Council of Nicaea. Nor were the Mass and other sacraments changed to admit of an ambiguously Arian interpretation. Nor did the clergy share common prayers with the Roman pagans in the name of peace and tolerance.

Even the most corrupt Popes who despoiled the fiscal treasury of the Church dared not lay their hands on the spiritual treasury.

If anything, this article somewhat understates the Church's difficulties.

The Remnant is not in favor of monarchy over democracy. I speak as someone who reads this newspaper religiously and have yet to read an article in that paper by Woods or Ferrara or anyone else in defense of this peculiar notion. As for opposition to JnPII, only someone willfully blind to reality could possibly support this Pope's multiple derelictions.

In any case, it's obvious you don't read The Remnant. It is simply traditionally Catholic, that's all. The idea that it is not supportive of democracy is just another crackpot notion Novus Ordonians have about traditionalists--and there are many such notions. I've been a traditional Catholic now for almost eight years now and have yet to meet a monarchist, priest or layman, let alone journalist.

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