Wikidworld (#62)
Wikidworld (#62)
For American Catholics, the most significant events of the 1960s were: 1) the Second Vatican Council (aka Vatican II); 2) the Immigration Act of 1965; and 3) the 1968 presidential election.
For American Catholics, the three most significant events of the 1960s were: 1) the Second Vatican Council (aka Vatican II); 2) the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965; and 3) the 1968 presidential election. In the remainder of this week, we’ll examine each of these events in turn. On Friday, I’ll suggest that the issue tying together all three of these catalytic, transformative events is population. Since the 1960s, it has largely been through the matrix of population-related issues that Catholic natural law has directly entered the public square.
Let’s start by considering why John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 doesn’t top—or even rate mention—on this list. Kennedy confirmed Catholics had arrived. Despite lingering concerns about anti-Catholic bias, no avenues of advancement remained closed to American Catholics. As we’ll see down the road, this was to become especially consequential for the legal profession in the United States and for subsequent developments in American jurisprudence. But in all other respects, the Kennedy election and presidency were epiphenomenal, less important in themselves than for what they signified.
Vatican II, however, absolutely does top the list. Almost before the Council had wrapped things up in 1965, it had become a commonplace that Vatican II had been the most important challenge to face the Catholic Church since the Reformation, that there was literally, for Catholics, life before Vatican II and life after. For an institution with a 2,000-year-old history, what could this possibly mean?
The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican—which met in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome over the course of four sessions, each lasting between 8 and 12 weeks—was opened in October 1962 by John XXIII was closed in December 1965 by Paul VI, who had succeeded John XXIII upon his death in 1963.
Pope John XXIII called the council because he felt the Church needed “updating” in order to connect with 20th-century people in an increasingly secularized world. Sixteen magisterial documents produced by the council proposed significant changes to both the doctrine and the practices of the Church: 1) an extensive reform of the liturgy; 2) a renewed theology of the Church, of revelation and of the laity; and 3) new approaches to ecumenism, to non-Christian religions, to religious freedom, and to relations between the Church and the world.
For the remainder, let’s lean into Garry Wills’s intricately threaded account of Vatican II in Bare Ruined Choirs. There are three parts to his argument that I’m going to try to wedge into this particular newsletter. The first concerns the neo-Scholastic revival and the rebirth of natural law theories of Church doctrine that preceded Vatican II. The second concerns liturgical reform, specifically the sunsetting of the Latin Mass. The third concerns the tortured logic underpinning Humanae Vitae, Paul XI’s contentious and obdurate encyclical on birth control.
One of the great ironies of the invigorating revival of interest in Thomist scholastic methods and natural law moral philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly among lay Catholics [recall from Wikidworld Season One, for instance, the development of the Analytic Thomist school of philosophy in the 1950s and 1960s], is the degree to which the American Church itself should have continued to suffer from its own intellectual failings, which found their ways into the Catholic schools in the form of a scurrilous indifference—if not outright hostility—to academic rigor and critical engagement with ideas. In the 1950s, as Sydney Ahlstrom reports, Catholics “lagged well behind the national average in science scholarship and other forms of intellectual leadership.”
In 1958, sociologist Thomas O’Dea published The Catholic Dilemma, which rooted these learning chasms “in long-established Catholic patterns of formalism, authoritarianism, clericalism, moralism, and defensiveness.” In this same year, the courageous and radical pontificate of John XXIII harried the American Church toward its own rendezvous with destiny, impelled forward by the conviction that to survive the Church must more fully integrate itself with and accommodate itself to society, that it could no longer subsist as a world apart.
As Garry Wills tells us, and as the debates that occurred during Vatican II demonstrated, the Church could no longer blind itself to the imperative to reform the traditional liturgy. The Latin Mass, the hocus-pocus of the Hoc est Corpus incantation, might transport parishioners to a cannibalistic communion with the Lord of Hosts. [The Black Mass of Hawthorne was always just a New Moon away from the traditional Latin Mass.] The blanket of superstition did not sit easily upon—it dis-eased—a Church grappling with the new canons of science and technology. But this new requirement, this new formulation, this new sacramental clarity—with the high altar now facing congregants who now might see face to face and take this as their unholy prerogative—required a Church also now disenchanted to live in a sunlight that all too often was also seen as a disinfectant.
Vatican II acknowledged that the Church need not simply age within a hardening, barnacled shell of tradition and ritual and cleared a path forward that allowed for the possibility of evolution and rejuvenation. Vatican II was many things, nearly all pointing toward some future for the Church that would allow it to survive and remain relevant, but only at the expense of nearly everything it had previously been.
For Catholic traditionalists, however, sexual freedom—combined with birth control—was the final reform, the ultimate abasement, of the Church as it had always existed. For Pope Paul VI— who was in every way different from his predecessor—this reform, this requirement was a bridge too far.
Of course, Church public relations armies had no difficulty explaining away Humanae Vitae as nothing more than a tactical feint. Paul VI’s stunning affirmation of Catholic birth control dogma—updated only to castigate the promethean alliance with science and technology that had made possible the invention of the birth control pill—had been merely a sop to the Church’s fuming traditionalists.
In reality, Humanae Vitae was the antinomy of Vatican II. It was the one thing amongst all the other many things—the only thing—that could subvert and destroy the modernizing, rejuvenating spirit of Vatican II. It was the parasite, the ride-along that Vatican II unwittingly hosted and sheltered.
In this sense, one of Vatican II’s most important legacies was to serve as the vector, the Trojan Horse, that allowed Catholic traditionalists to bide their time, husband their resources, send their agents to the hinterlands to organize the pitchforked peasants, and ultimately to storm the gates of modernity, both from within and from without.
National Conservatism, Christian Nationalism, Illiberal Authoritarianism are dimensions of a counterculture that cannot exist and thrive, cannot enact its own Black Mass, its own prurient witchery, without the sexual demonology that Humanae Vitae sheltered and preserved.
What I am reading today.
The Problem of Marjorie Taylor Greene (NY Times)
The Rise of Salem Media, a Conservative Radio Juggernaut (NY Times)
Election Administrators Are Under Attack. Here’s What That Means for the Upcoming Midterms. (ProPublica)
The Untold Story of the Pacific Northwest’s Nuclear Past (High Country News)
Post-Trump, wildlife passages along the border wall keep narrowing (High Country News)
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Wikidworld. Reimagining Western Civilization.
Season 2: The Catholic Moment
Episode 3: The 1960s
Part 2: Vatican II
Issue#: S2-E3-P2
Date: October 18, 2022