To understand how the church ended up undivided and yet divided, with all the tensions between tradition and modernity vibrating inside its walls, it helps to tell a story about the last fifty years of Catholic history.
So let’s tell three.
Once, more than fifty years ago now, there was an ecumenical council of the church. Its goal was to reorient Catholicism away from its nineteenth-century fortress mentality, to open a new dialogue with the Protestant churches and non-Christian religions and secular ideologies that it had once flatly condemned, and to prepare the church for an era of evangelization and renewal.
It was not intended to be a revolutionary council, but then again it wasn’t supposed to happen at all: It was an idea that came to Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, the kindly Italian elected in 1958 after eleven ballots as John XXIII, and he set the council into motion over the doubts and objections of many Vatican conservatives.
Even once conceived and announced, though, those same conservatives assumed that they could control it, channel its energies into a ringing affirmation of Catholic doctrine and not much more. But the church’s bishops, once assembled, had other ideas. With a new generation of theologians whispering in their ears, and perhaps the Holy Spirit as well, they rebelled against stage management by Vatican insiders, and followed the pope’s admonition to “throw open the windows of the church” and let in the outside air.
What ensued in Rome between October of 1962 and December of 1965 was an epochal event, a true turning point in the history of the faith. The council’s documents repudiated anti-Semitism, they embraced democracy and religious liberty, they opened the way for a renewal of the church’s fusty, antique Latin liturgy, they made ecumenical dialogue with other Christians and other religions possible for the first time. But more than all that, they changed the church’s self-image, replacing a vertical conception of the church as a priest-dominated hierarchy imposing rules and regulations with a horizontal conception of the church as the blessed, holy, spirit-discerning People of God.
This change was the real “spirit of Vatican II,” invoked by reformers ever after. It promised a more democratic Catholicism, a church more in tune with the consciences of individual believers, a church defined not by rigid doctrinal pronouncements but by constant dialogue—with other faiths, with the modern world, and within itself. The “spirit of Vatican II” promised a church for spiritually mature adults, rather than a “pray pay and obey” multitude clacking their rosaries and fretting about a stray Friday meatball. And its reforms were greeted with great joy and enthusiasm, the true fruits of the Holy Spirit, as a wave of renewal rippled across the Catholic world.
But then, tragically if perhaps inevitably, there was a backlash. Pope Paul VI, elected as John’s successor midway through the council’s sessions, tried to allow space for further innovation, but he also gave in to his fears, and the pleadings of conservatives, when he reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial contraception in the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. For countless Catholic couples this prohibition—justified by an abstruse natural law theology divorced from lived experience—was a betrayal of the council’s promise, and a permanent wound for people unable to reconcile their lived experience with the official doctrines of the church. The hierarchical church went one way, the People of God went another, and from that breach came a widening division between Rome and the reality of Catholic life.
Then came John Paul II. An admirable figure in many ways, an inspiring voice for freedom in his native Poland, he was also a reactionary on doctrinal matters, determined to rip up two decades of grassroots experimentation and centralize power in the Vatican once more. With the help of Joseph Ratzinger, the German theologian turned panzer kardinal, he doubled down on increasingly untenable pre–Vatican II positions—no to contraception, no to married priests and female priests, no to communion for the divorced and remarried, no to same-sex love, no to in vitro fertilization, no and no and no. He made the Western culture war over abortion and same-sex marriage the measure of Catholic orthodoxy, stifled or silenced brilliant theologians and pastorally minded bishops, and promoted yes-men in their place. Worse, he promoted or protected men who tolerated the abuse of minors while turning a blind eye to the obvious link between mandatory clerical celibacy and pedophilia, between the church’s cramped sexual vision and the perverted behavior of far too many priests.
His successor, Ratzinger-turned-Benedict, was in many ways even worse: a great theologian in his way, perhaps, but as pope just another reactionary, except this time a liturgical stickler without charisma or the common touch. His appointments were even more hopelessly conservative than his predecessor’s; his careless rhetoric inflamed the Muslim world; his attempted reconciliation with Latin Mass traditionalists led to scandal when he lifted the excommunication on a Holocaust-denying bishop; his attempted cleanup of the sex abuse scandal again refused to touch the problem’s roots in clericalism and hierarchy and sexual repression. Nothing in his papacy became him like the leaving of it: His stunning 2013 resignation was the kind of revolutionary gesture that the church so badly needed, and worth more than anything else he had said or done as pope.
So across these thirty-five years, the thirty-five years of John Paul and Benedict, the People of God suffered, they drifted, they dissented, and increasingly they simply decamped. The church had not modernized sufficiently, it had squandered or stifled its moment of renewal, it had refused to listen to the vox populi that was also, most likely, the vox dei. So why should anyone be surprised that in the West, at least, pews stood empty and large numbers of Catholics, baptized and confirmed, barely practiced the faith anymore? It was obvious what the Holy Spirit had intended to happen after the 1960s, obvious how the church needed to adapt to the newfound maturity of its members, obvious that Vatican II should have led to an ongoing transformation, a permanent reform. But all this had been stifled by the fears of a few old men in Rome, by conservative diehards in the laity, by a fear of change that was more suited to a church of Pharisees than the church of Jesus Christ.
So the church’s revolution, well begun fifty years ago, stood sadly unfinished as the conclave met in 2013 to elect Benedict’s successor. And the church waited, after years of unnecessary stagnation, for a new movement of the spirit, a new John XXIII, a new birth of freedom for the People of God.
• • •
That’s one story. Now let’s tell another.
Once, fifty years ago now, there was an ecumenical council of the church. Its goal was to reorient Catholicism away from its nineteenth-century fortress mentality, to open a new dialogue with other churches and religions, and to prepare the church for an era of evangelization and renewal.
The council turned out to be more reformist than anyone expected going in. A rising generation of bishops and theologians—many of whom would decisively influence the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI—took control of the process early, and their labors brought about a necessary reconciliation of Catholicism and liberal democracy, an important repudiation of anti-Semitism, a widening of the church’s intellectual horizons and a recovery of its ancient patrimony, and a welcome shift away from thundering anathemas to a more missionary spirit.
But the council’s reforms were limited in scope. Nothing in its deliberations and documents were meant to rewrite doctrine or Protestantize the faith; instead, essential Catholic truths—from the authority of the pope to the nature of the sacraments to the evils of divorce—were consistently reaffirmed. Vatican II was an adaptationist moment for the church, not a revolutionary one. Between 1962 and 1965, Catholicism changed so that it might remain essentially the same.
Unfortunately the world was changing even faster, the council’s sessions coincided with an era of social upheaval and cultural revolution in the West, and the Church’s hoped-for renewal was hijacked by those who favored a simple accommodation to the spirit of the late 1960s, and the transformation of the church along liberal Protestant lines. Soon two parties developed: a liberal-turned-conservative party that followed the actual documents of the council and sought continuity with the Catholic past, and a hijackers’ party loyal to a nebulous “spirit” of the council that just happened to coincide with the cultural fashions that came in in its wake.
This second party had its way in many Catholic institutions—seminaries, religious orders, liturgical conferences, Catholic universities, diocesan bureaucracies—for many years. In the hands of the hijackers, the Council’s call for liturgical reform became a license for aesthetic vandalism, its ecumenical spirit was invoked to downgrade Catholicism and treat it as just one church among many, its optimistic attitude toward modernity was bent into a blessing for the sexual revolution, and its call for a more empowered laity was used to undercut the importance of religious vocations, the sacraments, the mass, the very stuff of Catholic life. At every level of the church, Catholic distinctives were dismantled, downgraded, and dismissed in favor of a generic feel-good spirituality, a “Catholicism Lite” that was supposedly better suited to the modern age.
The results were, overall, disastrous: collapsing mass attendance, vanishing vocations, a swift erosion of Catholic identity everywhere you looked. Told that everything was suddenly open for debate, that the church no longer believed as it once had, that the centuries-old rituals and rhythms of the faith were just superstitions standing in the way of an allegedly grown-up (but actually secularized) Christian faith, ordinary Catholics drifted from the church. And the faster the alleged “spirit” of the Council worked itself out, in parishes and schools and religious orders, the faster Catholic numbers fell away.
At first, the papacy did little to stem this tide. Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae—and then failed to defend it or urge his bishops to champion it, confirming the impression that the church no longer took its own teachings seriously. As the faithful departed, he murmured and fretted and caviled, but mostly he accepted the hijackers’ power over Catholicism’s intermediate institutions, their swift transformation of the church’s language and liturgy and life.
But at last, in 1978 a pope was elected who belonged to the party of continuity, who rejected the hijacking of the council, who carried its true intentions forward while proclaiming the ancient truths of Catholicism anew. Like his right-hand man, Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul II had supported the reforms of Vatican II; indeed, the only four bishops who were actually excommunicated under his papacy were the council’s reactionary critics. But he also recognized that reform had turned into revolution, and necessary change had given way to vandalism. And so he set out, in effect, to reclaim the church for the church—to make it clear that Catholicism wasn’t simply going to dissolve into a generic postmodern spirituality, that its core teachings were still in place, that it was possible to be Catholic and modern, that the gospel was still the same yesterday and today.
This reclamation project was a difficult one, resisted and balked by “spirit of Vatican II” Catholics. But their Catholicism Lite had a fatal weakness: It failed to reproduce itself, failed to inspire new vocations, failed to win converts, failed to keep children in the faith, failed even to produce children in the first place. And as the hijackers aged and began to (literally) die out, the Catholic witness of the pope and his successor gradually inspired the kind of renewal the council fathers had hoped for: a generation of bishops, priests, and laity prepared to witness to the fullness of Catholicism, the splendor of its truth.
This generation faced many challenges, including the scorn of an increasingly secularized Western elite and the dragging anchor of the sex abuse crisis—which was unfairly blamed on conservative Catholicism and clerical celibacy when in reality it had flowered during the sexual chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. But the John Paul II model, even amid a sea of troubles, was the only available path to Catholic flourishing. The continued decline of the church’s liberal wing confirmed it; so did the collapse of the liberal Mainline Protestant churches that Catholicism Lite aspired to emulate; so did the rapid growth of a theologically conservative Catholicism in Africa and the church’s continued fade in the home territory of “spirit of Vatican II” Catholicism, Northern Europe.
By the time Benedict resigned and the conclave gathered to elect his successor, then, it was clear that this generation owned the Catholic future, that the liberal alternative had been tried and failed, and that the church of the twenty-first century would embody a successful synthesis—conservative but modern, rooted in tradition but not traditionalist—of conciliar and pre-conciliar Catholicism, the church of two thousand years of history and the church of Vatican II.
• • •
The two stories I’ve just sketched are the master narratives of liberal and conservative Catholicism in the West. The first one is probably better known, because it’s also the master narrative for most secular observers and critics of the church. But the second one has been deeply influential among many of the church’s most devout members, and it’s the narrative that’s guided many of the choices made at the highest levels of Catholicism over the last three decades.
These stories are not easily reconciled, and as my sympathies lie more with the conservative side it’s impossible to be fully impartial in assessing their respective strengths. But to understand the situation of the church in the age of Francis it’s important to attempt a synthesis.
So let’s tell a third story, and try to make it true.
Once, fifty years ago now, there was an ecumenical council of the church. Its goal was to reorient Catholicism away from its nineteenth-century fortress mentality, to open a new dialogue with other faiths and churches, and to prepare the church for an era of evangelization and renewal.
But from the beginning there was deep disagreement over what kind of reform was desirable and possible, and this disagreement ended up written into the documents of the council. For all its future-oriented rhetoric, Vatican II came to clear conclusions only when it looked backward. It dealt directly with problems (the church’s relationship to democracy, to religious liberty, to Judaism) that belonged to the crises and debates of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But when it looked forward it turned vague and prolix, with many generalizations about the state of modern man and his unprecedented situation and the need for the church to think and act and evangelize anew, but rather less that amounted to a concrete, specific agenda for such action.
In certain ways this vagueness was a matter of timing. The council began its deliberations at a moment of optimism about the church’s institutional strength, its internal cohesion, its capacity to deal successfully with the challenges of the modern age. It closed its sessions in 1965, with the birth control pill newly invented, the divorce revolution just beginning, second-wave feminism just gearing up, and gay rights still the most marginal of causes. In this sense it simply began and ended too soon to address the issues that broke across Catholicism and Christianity with the sexual revolution, and the distinctive crisis that subsequently swept over the church.
Here Vatican II partially resembles not the great councils of the Catholic past, but one of the failed ones: Fifth Lateran, the last council before the Protestant Reformation, which looked backward toward fifteenth-century debates and promoted reforms that were insufficient to address the storm that began just seven months after the council’s closing, when Martin Luther went to Wittenberg.
But it wasn’t just timing. There was also an essential lack of consensus, from the first, on how far the church could change, what kind of a new agenda could serve the Catholic future without betraying the Catholic past. This tension was evident in the words of John XXIII himself, when he opened the council with this exhortation:
What instead is necessary today is that the whole of Christian doctrine, with no part of it lost, be received in our times by all with a new fervor . . . that this doctrine be more fully and more profoundly known and that minds be more fully imbued and formed by it. What is needed is that this certain and unchangeable doctrine, to which loyal submission is due, be investigated and presented in the way demanded by our times. For the deposit of faith, the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, are one thing; the fashion in which they are expressed, but with the same meaning and the same judgment, is another thing. This way of speaking will require a great deal of work and, it may be, much patience: types of presentation must be introduced which are more in accord with a teaching authority which is primarily pastoral in character.1
This whole of Christian doctrine . . . certain and unchangeable . . . with the same meaning and the same judgment . . . In the debates that followed Vatican II, conservative Catholics could cite these words and many others like them as proof-texts for their argument that the council had not changed anything essential, and anything that hadn’t changed explicitly should still be held as “certain and unchangeable” by Catholics the world over, in 1995 or 2015 no less than 1945.
But then: . . . investigated and presented in the way demanded by our times . . . a great deal of work and, it may be, much patience . . . types of presentation must be introduced . . . a teaching authority which is primarily pastoral in character . . . In these words, and others like them, liberal Catholics heard clear permission to effectively reshape the church’s teachings, to press to the edge of what Catholic dogma permitted—and beyond?—if so doing seemed like the way to reach the modern mind. (Indeed, so fraught were these interpretative battles that some liberals later claimed—almost certainly incorrectly—that John XXIII had not actually spoken the phrase “with the same meaning and the same judgment,” and that it had been inserted into the official record later by a fearful conservative editor.)
Because the Council had many authors, and because many of those authors were themselves uncertain about what could be changed, both of these readings of its documents were in some sense intended by Vatican II. Not by accident but by design—albeit the design of a hive mind rather than a singular intelligence—there was a tension between the letter and the spirit of the council, between what was explicitly altered and what was only implied. Sometimes (on religious liberty, in particular) there seemed to be a plainly revised teaching, but even where there wasn’t there was a new language, and the apparent retirement of older phrases and rhetoric and forms. And this linguistic shift inevitably suggested a new teaching, to those who wished to have one, even as it stopped short of offering one outright.
So in the wars that followed, both interpretations of the council, both stories of what it was intended to accomplish, could stake a claim to carrying on the legacy of Vatican II. And then as the power dynamic shifted and then shifted again within the church, both sides could nurse a reasonable sense of betrayal, shock, and disappointment when their interpretation lost ground or failed to be generally accepted.
When the “spirit of Vatican II” was interpreted to mean that altars should be stripped and nuns should lose their habits and guitars should replace Gregorian chants and confession should be neglected and political interpretations of the gospel should be privileged over moral exhortations and the words “mortal sin” and “hell” and “purgatory” should vanish from sermons and annulments should be granted for practically any cause and seminaries should relax about sexual activity among priests-to-be because Catholic sexual ethics were in a period of creative flux . . . well, amid all these experiments and more, conservatives could reasonably accuse liberals of a kind of radicalism, because the documents of Vatican II did not license anything like this.
But then when the Vatican under John Paul II and Benedict XVI began disciplining bishops and policing theologians and criticizing Catholic colleges that seemed to stray too far from orthodoxy; when it condemned the most famous manifestation of the post–Vatican II social gospel, liberation theology; when it ordered visitations of seminaries and religious orders to make sure that their pedagogy and spirituality were doctrinally correct; when it cracked down on sacramental abuses (group confession, communion for remarried divorcées) and reasserted teachings that had seemed flexible in the 1970s (the intrinsic evil of certain sinful acts, the “gravely deficient” status of non-Catholic Christian faiths); when it declared that certain questions raised by the sexual revolution, including questions where vast numbers of Catholics now differed with the church, were not open for debate; when it sought to restore more antique language to the liturgy and rein in local experiments . . . amid all this pushback, all this reaction, liberals could understandably complain that this wasn’t the church that had been promised them, that the Vatican was effectively withdrawing permissions that had once been extended and changing its mind about how much of John XXIII’s “patience” should be shown to people trying to be Catholic in a complicated new world.
From the point of view of the church’s unity, though, it’s notable that neither the period of liberal ascendance nor the conservative reaction that followed pushed the church’s divisions to the point of outright schism. Because the liberal era took place under a flag of “pastoral experiments” that Rome tolerated but rarely officially endorsed—and because on the major question where the papacy explicitly weighed in, birth control, the traditional answer was reaffirmed—the conservative side could tell itself that liberalism’s ascendance hadn’t affected the deposit of faith, hadn’t made the papacy contradict itself, hadn’t pitched the church into a true theological crisis. (There was a subgenre of conservative commentary in the 1960s and 1970s that assumed Paul VI simply had bad advisers, that like the tsar in Russian fable he would rein in the liberals if only someone told him what they were doing.) This conservative belief required a line-drawing, a thus-far-and-no-further, that could seem somewhat arbitrary in hindsight. But it was convincing enough to keep most conservative Catholics resentful and anxious but also relatively docile throughout the 1970s, while the traditionalist fringe remained a fringe. And even the main traditionalist splinter group, the Society of Saint Pius X led by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, insisted that they had never intended rebellion, that they remained loyal to the papacy even if the papacy considered them in schism.
Then in the same way, although the John Paul and Benedict eras certainly created a climate in which liberal theologians trod carefully and theological conservatism was seen as the only path to advancement for ambitious bishops, the Vatican’s pushback against liberal theology never went as far as the old campaigns against modernism in the pre–Vatican II church. Liberal Catholics weren’t purged or provoked to open rebellion, their hold over many Catholic institutions was weakened but not broken, and their personal identification with the church was strained but not severed. Precisely because the John Paul/Benedict reaction wasn’t a comprehensive war on modernism, because it took the form of exhortations and a conservative tilt in appointments and sporadic disciplinary action rather than an attempted top-to-bottom housecleaning, it wasn’t that hard for many liberals to draw a distinction between “the Vatican” and the real church (or between “the hierarchy” and “the People of God,” to use post–Vatican II language) and to treat the entire post-1978 era as a kind of temporary conservative coup, in which they had lost the levers of power but hadn’t lost anything permanent. After all, what one coup could accomplish another could eventually undo.
So for all the real radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s and then the real backlash that followed, overall the post–Vatican II church experienced a kind of uneasy truce. The church’s official teaching remained relatively stable once the council’s changes were digested, reassuring conservatives in their bedrock assumption that the church’s essentials have to endure for the faith to be called Catholic. At the same time, everyday life within most Western Catholic institutions made a lot of room for dissent and disagreement, enabling liberal Catholics to feel reasonably at home in the church while they waited for Rome to finally see the light.
This combination satisfied neither side. But it gave both sides incentives to live together, to remain within the fold, to avoid putting too much stress on the church’s internal contradictions, to steer clear of decisive breaks. And the uneasy truce also allowed both theories of Catholicism’s relationship to modernity to effectively be put to the test at once, on a scale that allows for conclusions to be drawn about their viability, their ability to actually deliver on their promise of renewal for the twenty-first-century church.
The first conclusion is that the liberal path really did lead very easily to dissolution and decline. This idea was a conservative talking point, yes, and it came in various caricatured forms, and there were plenty of exceptions to the general rule . . . but over years and decades, the sociological evidence was striking, consistent, and difficult to escape. More liberal religious orders and dioceses were less likely to produce the vocations necessary to sustain themselves. (Two mid-1990s surveys by the sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark found that “religious orders retaining the more traditional demands had far more members in formation programs” and that traditional dioceses had about four times as many ordinations as the most liberal counterparts.)2 More liberal Catholic universities and colleges were more likely to secularize and shed their Catholic identity entirely. Conservative Catholics had more children than their more liberal brethren, part of a consistent pattern across faith traditions (Orthodox Jews were more fecund than Reform Jews, conservative evangelicals had more kids than Mainline Protestants, and so forth), and the children of conservative households were more likely to retain their faith. In their 2014 survey of “Young Catholic America,” the sociologist Christian Smith and his coauthors found that Catholic teenagers from more conservative Catholic households were more likely to practice their faith regularly into adulthood than Catholic teens from more theologically liberal households.
So too at the level of countries and cultures. In the heartland of “spirit of Vatican II” Catholicism, the Northern European nations whose theologians contributed so much to the council’s liberal voice, the church’s collapse was swift, steep, and stunning. Over the course of two generations, much of German and French and Belgian and Dutch Catholicism turned into Potemkin churches, rich in art and finery and historic buildings but empty of numbers, vitality, and zeal. In the swath of Latin America where liberation theology was supposed to bring Catholicism closer to the masses, the masses turned instead to Pentecostalism, choosing a mix of frank supernaturalism and prosperity-gospel preaching over a gospel of political liberation. Meanwhile in Africa, the church was resilient and growing even amid war and misery and persecution—and African Catholicism was far more theologically conservative than in the fading Catholic West.
These patterns were already obvious during the 1970s, when liberal ideas and experiments were at their peak. The institutional collapse of the Catholic Church in the West—the exodus from seminaries, the sudden drop in mass attendance, the swift erosion of Catholic distinctives across a number of fronts—happened before the years of John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger. “Why Conservative Churches Are Growing,” Dean Kelley’s well-known sociological study, was published in 1972, and though much of his argument focused on the gains of conservative Protestant denominations, Catholicism was featured as a prime example of a church losing ground as it liberalized.
Disappointment over Humanae Vitae probably played some role in these trends, as liberals often argued. But it can’t have been the decisive factor, since Protestant churches and denominations that went much, much further than the post–Vatican II Catholic Church in accepting the cultural revolution of the 1960s—churches that accepted not just contraception but divorce and abortion and later same-sex marriage; churches whose theology became so open as to render all creedal definitions irrelevant—hemorrhaged members even faster. The Episcopal Church in the United States, which more than any other body seemed to resemble the church that liberal Catholics wanted to experiment their way toward, was the particularly depressing case study: After fifty years spent racing toward the vanguard of every social change, it entered the twenty-first century a graying sect, split by schism and declining toward extinction.
These trends fed into—indeed, built—the master narrative of conservative Catholicism. As liberal Catholicism faded and liberal Protestantism collapsed, conservative Catholics began to take it as a given that liberalism in religion meant demographic suicide. They developed a kind of modest triumphalism about their own resilience, their wisdom in resisting liberalism’s siren song. By the late 1990s, when John Paul II began talking about the twenty-first century as a “new springtime” for Catholicism, most of the church’s conservatives assumed that their families and parishes and orders and institutions were the only possible seedbed for that spring.
But this conservative triumphalism was not modest enough. Because the second conclusion we might draw from the trends of the last fifty years is that conservative Catholicism was a preservationist enterprise more than a dynamic one. It limited decline without producing impressive new growth. It was more successful than the church’s liberal wing—but only comparatively. And sometimes the difference between their respective trajectories was only a matter of degree.
Most of the trends noted above, vocations and retention rates and more, gave an edge to the conservatives but showed a common diminution regardless of theology, or at best a partial recovery under John Paul II and Benedict. If the church tended to weaken faster under liberal leadership or in liberal cultural climes, as in Germany or the Low Countries, it could weaken or even collapse in more conservative regions and situations as well. Twenty years after Vatican II there seemed to be more strength in Italian Catholicism or American Catholicism or Irish Catholicism—all more “conservative” Catholic contexts, in different ways—than there was in the German or Belgian or French churches. But the church’s position in Ireland declined thereafter, hastened by various awful abuse scandals, the belated arrival of the sexual revolution, and the secularizing effects of Ireland’s economic boom. In Italy the shift wasn’t as precipitous, but there too (as almost everywhere) economic growth led to increased secularization, the nation’s birth rate was soon among the lowest in Europe, and the generation born in the 1980s was less Catholic than any prior Italian cohort. The American church, meanwhile, owed much of its continuing demographic robustness to Hispanic immigration; among white and native-born Americans, across the John Paul II era, mass attendance continued its post-1960s slide.
Nor did the papal reassertion of Catholic teaching do much to close the post-1960s gap between what the church taught (on sexual ethics, especially, but on other matters as well) and what many post–Vatican II Catholics believed. The inconsistent and lapsed dissented from church teaching more than frequent churchgoers, but even among regular massgoers there was a persistent split in the West—about fifty-fifty on divorce and later same-sex marriage, about eighty-twenty in favor of the acceptability of contraception. The division didn’t go away when the Vatican began reining in the church’s liberals, and neither did the widespread post–Vatican II sense that one could be a good Catholic without fulfilling duties (attending mass every Sunday) or holding beliefs (the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, the bodily resurrection of the dead) that the church insisted were nonoptional.
Here the conservative conceit that dissenters would eventually drift away completely or die off gave theological liberalism too little credit. The promise of some kind of reconciliation between Catholicism and late modernity, sexual modernity especially, had a persistent, entirely understandable appeal. Many Catholics might pass from theological liberalism into secularism, but enough remained Catholic to matter, and many people raised with a rote or repressive form of faith continued to find in the church’s liberal wing a sense of openness, mercy, and relief. Likewise the tribal pull of Catholic ancestry, while too weak to maintain a robust Catholic culture, nonetheless left many people with a strong sense of the church as their church regardless of their disagreements with its leaders, and so they persistently declined to give up the territory they held within it. This was a reality that frustrated theological conservatives, who wondered why liberal Catholics didn’t simply join the Episcopal Church or some similar body where their convictions were actively embraced. But religion is always experienced tribally and communally as well as doctrinally, so the conservative frustration was intellectually understandable but ultimately obtuse.
Thus theological liberalism remained influential despite its weaknesses, retained despite doubts and rediscovered as often as it seemed to wane. Meanwhile, conservative Catholicism struggled to find a way to escape its defensive crouch, to define itself not just in factional terms but as Catholicism in full. It held a core of believers—a crucial core, without which Catholicism’s trajectory would have followed the Protestant Mainline all the way down—and maintained a counterculture to support them. But it also had many of the faults to which countercultures are heir.
It remained institutionally weak, despite its close association with the papacy. Many of the legacy institutions of Western Catholicism, the diocesan bureaucracies and national committees and prominent universities and charitable organizations, never reconciled themselves to the John Paul II era, or they went along with it halfheartedly, awaiting a different era and a different pope. So conservatives found themselves dependent on a hodgepodge of small colleges and publishing houses and start-up religious orders, which in turn bred both insularity and vulnerability. The conservative intellectual scene sometimes felt like an endless round of reaffirmation and polemic, overdependent on appeals to John Paul’s encyclicals, and lacking the sense of aesthetic possibility that traditionally defined Catholic literature, philosophy, and art. And like many self-selected communities it seemed to lack a critical mass of, well, normal people—as John Zmirak, a traditionalist gadfly, pointed out in a reflection on the lifetime he had spent inside the conservative subculture:
It isn’t normal for the Church to consist just of saints and zealots, ascetical future “blesseds,” and Inquisition re-enactors. Faith is meant to be yeast that yields a hearty loaf of bread. But since 1968 there has been nothing left to leaven, and we find ourselves eating yeast. . . . The last time I was at the Catholic Marketing Network, which includes all the leading companies in the orthodox Catholic market, most of the attendees seemed to be people who’d bought their own booths—so the whole day was spent watching vendors try to sell each other their stuff. (“I’ll trade you three copies of The Secret of the Rosary for one of those 3-D Divine Mercy holograms.”)3
This self-enclosure and embattlement also meant that conservatives were slow to grasp the scope of the sex abuse crisis (because they were slow to trust the media outlets that reported on it, and loath to criticize a hierarchy that they needed on their side), and fatally slow to recognize the vipers and con men and false mystics in their midst. (“It’s such a pleasant surprise to find a fellow orthodox Catholic,” Zmirak noted, that there’s always a temptation “not to ask too many more questions—for instance, about the person’s qualifications, talent, or temperament.”)4 A figure like Marcial Maciel, the Mexican-born founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who built one of the more apparently fruitful conservative religious orders only to be revealed as a bigamist, drug addict, and pedophile, could have seduced his way to power in any environment. But the embattled conservative-Catholic subculture’s eagerness for Success Stories made it that much easier for him to flourish.
The same weakness was apparent when conservative Catholicism engaged politically, especially in the United States. In theory it retained the ideological unpredictability appropriate to a universal church, with intellectual heroes who belonged to no party or clique. (Two of the most influential philosophers for younger conservative Catholics were Elizabeth Anscombe, a Wittgenstein disciple who defended Humanae Vitae and also denounced Harry Truman as a mass murderer for his use of the atomic bomb; and Alasdair MacIntyre, whose After Virtue was a seminal critique of modern moral thought and whose views on political economy were socialist.) But by necessity, given its own sociological weakness, when it engaged politically the church’s conservative wing did so first as an ally and then as a client of right-wing parties, which required downplaying portions of the Catholic inheritance that made a poor fit with right-wing ideology.
This posture, and the attempt to make the complexity of Catholic social teaching fit inside a right-wing box, often alienated people—Catholics or potential Catholics—whose religious imaginations balked at the idea that God required them to vote for George W. Bush. And the ever-tighter link between tradition-minded Catholicism and conservative political operations was one reason among many that the conservative Catholicism of the John Paul II era did not turn out to be a particularly effective missionary force.
There was a great deal of rhetoric about the “new evangelization,” and Catholicism still attracted a certain kind of convert. But in the West far more believers lapsed than entered, while around the world (with, again, a partial African exception) the church’s growth was driven more by demographic momentum than conversion, and Catholic missionary efforts were lapped by Protestants in Latin America and East Asia. In Western cultural debates, the church’s language of natural law—which claimed to be based only on reason, not revelation, and thus offered a common ground for all people of goodwill—only seemed to persuade the already converted. No matter how it couched its positions, the church lost argument after argument about marriage, family, sexuality, euthanasia—and eventually found itself in a rearguard battle to protect its own liberties from secular encroachment. Politically, sociologically, and theologically, the faith remained as much on the defensive after decades of conservative reassertion as it had during the years of liberal experimentation, and there seemed little prospect of a change.
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So the story of the post–Vatican II church is best understood not as a story of a promising renewal betrayed by the hierarchy (the liberal version) or a temporarily hijacked renewal recovered by John Paul II (the conservative vision). Rather, it’s a story of shared failure and persistent troubles, in which the idea of renewal was constantly invoked but rarely evident—at least on a scale commensurate to the challenges the church faced. Liberal Catholicism’s failure was starker, but neither faction in the church’s civil war could claim to have delivered Catholicism out of crisis. Neither could claim that their interpretation of the council had led to anything like the renewal or new springtime or new evangelization that had been promised. Instead, their long wars ensured that the church turned inward, litigating its divisions rather than preaching the gospel to the world.
More liberal Catholics, more alienated from the papacy and the church, sometimes had a clearer appreciation of this failure than conservatives. The wisest among them were willing to entertain critiques of how liberalization had run aground in the 1970s. But even conservatives who revered John Paul and admired Joseph Ratzinger’s determination to protect the faith from fashionable currents could see by the 2010s that papal leadership was insufficient to the church’s challenge, and that something new was required if Catholicism was not to be permanently divided and adrift.
Whatever the new vision might be, it would need to somehow transcend the wars of Vatican II, to claim a Catholicism that wasn’t limited by the essentially political labels attached the post-conciliar combatants. It would need, perhaps, a fiercer attachment to orthodoxy and tradition than the reformers of the 1960s and 1970s had shown, but also a more capacious view of the Catholic teaching and a less partisan self-understanding than the conservative Catholic counterculture displayed. It would need a new aesthetic vision (or, counterculturally, an older one) for the digital age; new forms of community for an age of individualism and isolation; new intellectual horizons for where secularism seemed exhausted, incoherent, and yet still largely unchallenged. It would need new lines of engagement with modern attitudes and mores—or perhaps it would need to leave the post–sexual revolution West to work out its own issues for a time, and discover the Catholic future in China’s underground churches, in the bloody borderland between African Christianity and Islam, in the contest with evangelicalism and Pentecostalism for the soul of the developing world. In either case, it would need to draw from the now global church, to escape the debates that French and German theologians had begun by discovering what Nigerian or Brazilian or South Korean Catholicism had to offer the universal church.
The limits of the papal office, limned in the last chapter, meant that such a renewal seemed unlikely to be handed down from above. Writing in the Atlantic upon Ratzinger’s election as Benedict, the Catholic writer and biographer Paul Elie wisely remarked that “much of what is best in the Catholic tradition has arisen in the shadow of an essentially negative papacy, and much of what is worst has occurred when popes overplayed their role.”5 He was addressing a liberal audience, but the message was appropriate for conservatives as well, at the time accustomed to John Paul II’s charisma and global presence, and too quick to imagine that the pope would always be the first and best champion for orthodoxy, vitality, and renewal.
Because historically that was not usually the Catholic way. As Elie suggested, the church in ages of crisis and torpor alike has again and again found renewal from below—from Benedict and his monks in Rome’s twilight; from Saints Francis and Dominic in the High Middle Ages; from Catherine of Siena in an age of schism; from English converts in the Victorian and Edwardian eras; and on. There was no reason to think that the landscape of after “after Vatican II” would be different. In the early years of the twenty-first century, there was no way to know who would renew and reshape the post–John Paul II, post–Benedict XVI church. But one assumption seemed safe: The most important figures in the Catholic future would not be their successors on the papal throne.