Traditionalist 'cafeteria Catholics', again

My correspondence in the Universe continues: after my last letter about Martin Elsworth's accusation of 'Cafeteria Catholicism' against the SSPX, he leveled the charge against me. Last weekend his letter said, in part:

'In rejecting [Vatican II]'s teaching on the need for reform in the liturgy, religious freedom and relations with other Churches [sic] and faiths, among other things, the Lefebvrists show themselves to be at odds with the magisterium.
...
Could Mr Shaw too really be a cafeteria Catholic, just picking and choosing what it is he wants to believe?

So, the 'need for reform in the liturgy' is a dogma of the Faith now, is it? An interesting idea. My reply:

Mr Elsworth (Letter, 17th Feb) claims, among other things, that the Second Vatican Council taught ‘the need for a reform in the liturgy’, and that since ‘traditionalists like Dr Shaw’ reject this, we are ‘dissenters’. There is a nest of confusions in this assertion. 

Whether there is a need for liturgical reform is something which is going to vary from age to age, and it depends not simply on the truths of Faith entrusted to the Church by Our Lord, but on empirical observations. Vatican II’s treatment of the liturgy, in Sacrosantum Concilium (SC), outlines a limited programme of possible changes. If Mr Elsworth thinks this is a set of dogmatic truths, he presumably thinks Pope Paul VI committed heresy by permitting Mass entirely in the vernacular, when SC 32 said ‘the use of the Latin language is to be preserved’. But exactly what form the reform, if any, should take, is a matter of prudential judgement and free discussion.

By contrast, the Council of Trent solemnly anathematised condemnations of the ‘ceremonies, vestments, and outward signs’ of the (Traditional) Mass, and of the silent Canon (Session XXII, Canons 7 and 9). I hope Mr Elsworth has not chosen arbitrarily to reject this infallible teaching.

Catholics are free to believe that there was no need for liturgical reform in 1962. Again, they are free to believe that reform was implemented unwisely: Pope Benedict himself famously wrote, before his election, that the 1970 Missal was ‘a banal on-the-spot product’. Finally, they are free to believe that the reform was good, but that the Traditional Mass is still worthy of preservation. It is this range of views that the Holy Father had in mind when he urged us, when he issued Summorum Pontificum in 2007, to ‘make room for everything which the Faith itself allows’.

I would encourage Mr Elsworth to take that admonition to heart.

As I have argued before, liberal Catholics tends to share with Ultramontanist conservatives an inability to distinguish dogma (and 'dogmatic facts') from non-dogmatic statements in Church documents. These include, most obviously, prudential judgements and policies. Thus, when Bl. Pope John Paul II said (Evangelium Vitae 27), about the Death Penalty, that 'Modern society in fact has the means of effectively suppressing crime by rendering criminals harmless without definitively denying them the chance to reform', he was making a judgment about empirical conditions and the likely consequences of practical policies. It appears, for example, from the context of his remarks that he had Western democracies in mind. What about societies where highly dangerous prisoners can reliably bribe or fight their way to freedom? These are serious questions. The views of a Pope deserve a hearing, but they don't demand the assent of dogma.

The elision of dogmatic and prudential statements by conservative and liberal Catholics serve opposite ends, however: the conservatives want us to accept them all without distinction, the liberals want us to hold them all with equal contempt. Mr Elsworth wants to urge the charge of 'cafeteria Catholicism' against trads not because he is an ultramontanist himself, but because he thinks it a paradox that trads don't come up to the self-imposed standards of conservatives.

His own views are, in fact, rather interesting. Over the past year he has written six letters to the Catholic Herald which criticise or deny a series of practices or teachings.

In June 2012 he attacked clerical celibacy.

In August 2012 he attacked the (then, new) Bishop Gilbert of Aberdeen for the latter's critique of same-sex marriage.

In November 2012 he attacked clerical dress, and in a separate letter opposed Daphne McLeod's defence of traditional catechesis.

In January 2013 he declared that the Church as Mystical Body is 'obscured' by the 'institutional Church'.

Also in January this year, he attacked Humanae Vitae. He began his letter:

Is there not something essentially absurd about the cult of personality with which some Catholics invest the papacy, as if the Pope were a Soviet dictator whose every pronouncement has to be greeted with uncritical adulation?

Hmm...

Letter in the Universe: Cafereteria traditional Catholics

Last weekend Mr Martin Elsworth wrote, in the Universe letters column, in part:

A general ecumenical council such as Vatican II is the highest expression of the magisterium of the Catholic Church.
    As such, the legitimacy of its teachings is beyond question for any true Catholic.
    In choosing what it wants to believe the SSPX is guilty of the 'cafeteria' Catholicism it would no doubt impute to those whom is would dismiss as liberal Catholics.

One of the difficulties in addressing this issue is that, even if it were my place to comment on the position of the SSPX - which it isn't - their precise position is not publicly known. We know that talks took place between their representatives and theologians of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that these talks didn't lead (or haven't yet led) to the SSPX's regularisation, but we don't know what points of difference were identified, or what the sticking points were. All we have, in fact, are the public pronouncements of individuals within the SSPX. Even a sermon by the Superior General can't without further ado be described as 'the SSPX position', still less the words of anyone else.

So my concern in replying was to a more general point: the suggestion of a parallel between 'traditionalist' and 'liberal' dissidents. This is a common idea and it is worth making people stop to think about what is being said.

Sir,

Martin Elsworth (Letters, 3rd Feb) accuses the SSPX of ‘cafeteria Catholicism’, and tells us, of the Second Vatican Council, that ‘the legitimacy of its teachings is beyond question for any true Catholic.’ While I cannot speak for the SSPX, I would suggest that anyone entering this minefield make a rather more careful use of language than Mr Elsworth.

What ‘true Catholics’ believe is the teaching of the Church. Unlike policies or prudential judgements, with which we are free to disagree (though not always to disobey), the teaching of the Church cannot change, though expressions of it may draw out more and more of its implications.

So, while the Second Vatican Council did not make any dogmatic definitions, it did reiterate many teachings defined earlier, whether by the Extraordinary or the Ordinary Magisterium. If we want to accuse anyone of not being a ‘true Catholic’, we should in justice point to specific teachings which that person clearly rejects, and the clear expression of them in the Magisterium as the constant teaching of the Church, and not just as a policy or ‘attitude’.

This is easy enough with real dissidents: modern theologians condemned by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith have rejected teachings we can pinpoint as infallibly defined by Trent, Vatican I,
or in the constant teaching of Councils and Popes, on the priesthood, morality, or Papal infallibility. Where there is no such clarity, we should not be hasty to condemn.

Here is a challenge for anyone wanting to talk about the 'cafeteria Catholicism' of conservatives or traditionalists: what, exactly, are the doctrines supposedly being rejected by your targets, and where are they clearly and authoritatively defined in the Magisterium?

The fact is that these critics never bother doing this. While the theologians of the CDF toil away identifying passages in the works of notorious dissidents incompatible with the Ten Commandments - did it really take the Church's highest theological authority under the Pope to notice that Fr Tony Flannery was ski-ing off piste when he said that adultery was not a sin? - trads are condemned on the grounds of a faulty 'attitude'. What in heaven's name does that mean? Who defines the correct attitude? Are liberals given some gift of the Holy Ghost which enables them to discern attitudes?

It is time the gross injustice of rash judgement, the presumptuous labeling of our fellow Catholics as what amounts to heretics on imaginary grounds, ceased. Our Lord will judge us for our lightest word.

But I tell you that any man who is angry with his brother must answer for it before the court of justice, and any man who says Raca to his brother must answer for it before the Council; and any man who says to his brother, Thou fool, must answer for it in hell fire. (Matthew 5.22)

More letters on the Egans

The Christmas issue of the Catholic Herald published my letter in reply to Martin Elsworth, on Br Egan's criticism of Bishop Egan. Round 1 is here. It was published beneath a second letter from Br Egan. My reply to Elsworth worked well as a reply to this new letter rom Br Egan, so this is a neat conclusion to this exchange.

Mr Elsworth (Letters, 14th December) defends the peculiar phrase ‘John’s last Supper model of the servant Church’, despite St John not giving us a narrative of the Last Supper, on the basis that the mandatum took place ‘at supper’.  Alternatively, the phrase might point to the ‘Farewell Discourses’ which follow. I think we can agree that the phrase is misleading, and that anyone familiar with the Fourth Gospel would more naturally refer specifically to the mandatum, or the Farewell Discourses, or whatever he actually meant, if he wished to be understood.

And what do we read in the Farewell Discourses? ‘If you love Me you will keep my commandments.’ (John 14.45) There is no tension between keeping the commandments and loving Our Lord and our fellows. Doing what God commands is the necessary precondition for helping others and attaining holiness, because it is nothing other than uniting our wills with God’s. As the Penny Catechism expresses it so pithily (123), ‘Mortal sin kills the soul by depriving it of sanctifying grace, which is the supernatural life of the soul.’

In the ‘liberal’ society praised by Br Edward Egan, whom Mr Elsworth defends, living according to God’s commands, according to Natural Law, is first allowed as a private eccentricity, then persecuted, and finally—as we can see with legislation before Parliament as I write—simply outlawed. We have already been told that teachers will be sacked for teaching about marriage in accordance with Natural Law. For how long will parents be allowed to do the same thing?

Our bishops have rightly alerted us to the danger. We should listen to them, not to Br Egan’s selective reading of the Gospels.

It is of course true, as Br Egan claims, that there is an historical connection between Christianity and liberalism, but it is not that liberalism emerged out of a Christian concern for toleration and freedom to pursue evils ways of life without hindrance. Rather, it emerged out of he failure of Protestantism to remain united as a national religion in England and places like Prussia and America, leading to people like Locke saying that toleration of religious dissent (not, of course, of Catholicism), was necessary if we were to get on with the serious business of making money from the slave-trade and the like. But that, as they say, is history...

The Fruits of Pre-Conciliar Catechesis

Daphne McLeod, the Chairman of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, has been carrying on a lively correspondence in the Catholic Herald, defending her view that the problems of the Church since the Council have been overwhelmingly due to the failure of the 'new catechetics' which followed it. Specifically, in England all Religious Education teachers had to be retrained by an institution called 'Corpus Christi College' which was a hotbed of heresy, and was finally closed down by Cardinal Heenan. By then, Mrs McLeod tells us, its work had sadly already been done.

Tellingly, she explains that the English translation of the Council's document on education, Gravissimum Educationis, did not appear until 1971, when Corpus Christi College was already closed. The claim that 'the Council' had demanded a revolution in the content and method of religious education was revealed to be completely false, but too late.

'By their fruits you shall know them', Mrs McLeod says: because it has led to lapsation, the new catechetical method is shown to be problematic. However, she does not really address the point made by the previous letter, by a certain Martin Elsworth, that if catechesis was so wonderful before the Council, how was it that things collapsed so rapidly after the Council? Why, we might ask, did adults with this old catechesis fall for every absurd theological fad after the Council, or even give up the practice of the Faith? Why were Catholic RE teachers - of all people, surely the vanguard of the 'well-instructed laity' praised by Cardinal Spellman - so easy to brainwash with a lot of nonsense? Why did no-one think to ask any of the Latinists, so plentyful in the 1960s, what Gravissimum Educationis actually said? Why, in short, was the generation educated between the 1930s and the 1950s led to their destruction, like sheep to the slaughter, with so little resistance? A generalisation to which, of course, Daphne McLeod is such an honourable exception.

It is of course quite possible to check for oneself what pre-Conciliar Catholics were taught: many of the most influential texts have been reprinted, and they are indeed far superior in orthodoxy to much of the stuff written since then. I have before me a copy of the Baltimore Catechism Number 4: this is the teacher's manual, with the fullest treatment of each topic. What does it say about Infallibility? Naturally it tells us that it only extends to ex cathedra statements by the Pope on matters of faith and morals, and that on other matters, or in other statements, the Pope can err. But then it adds:

"Nevertheless, whatever the Pope teaches on any subject you can be pretty sure he is right."

Is there a distinction between matters of discipline and policy in which we should follow even wrong-headed commands for the sake of unity and to avoid scandal, and 'unjust commands' which it would be a sin to follow?

Is there a discussion of cases of the Popes treating the saints badly, and how they responded?

Is there a distinction between policies and prudential judgements, in which one Pope may contradict another, or indeed himself, and matters of Church teaching, in which we should adopt a hermeneutic of continuity: i.e., we should understand what Popes and Councils have said as harmonising if at all possible?

Is there a distinction between basic matters of faith, which as St Robert Bellarmine said should be just obvious to the Faithful, and about which they should never tolerate false teaching from anyone, and more complex matters on which the ordinary laity might best be encouraged to follow the teaching of Pope and Bishops even when they are unsure its orthodoxy?

Is there any discussion of the different levels of authority, or the credence due to past Councils and the Ordinary Magisterium, which should take priority over what is reported as being an off-the-cuff remark by the present Pope, since after all such reports are constantly subject to distortion, tendentious reporting, and misunderstanding?

No, no, no, no, and again no. The teaching of the Baltimore Catechism is one-sided and deficient, and it failed. I should be interested to know if any other catechetical handbooks of the era do better than Baltimore Catechism on this topic, but I don't get the impression that they did. What is more, the ultramontanism of the Baltimore Catechism is still the dominant ideology of many neo-conservatives, even as they reject so many other Catholic assumptions of the day, including the trenchant defence of the Temporal Power of the Papacy which can be found in the catechism's very next pages.

See also my blog post on Daphne McLeod's claim that Trads aren't interested in catechesis;
and a series of posts on the notion of obedience.