Para celebrar os sessenta anos do Concílio Vaticano II, o prestigiado jornal New York Times publicou um comentário de Ross Douthat, católico convertido, que não pretende fazer uma análise enigmática ou reacionária, mas aponta o fracasso do Concílio Vaticano II.
“O Concílio Vaticano II falhou nos termos
estabelecidos pelos seus próprios partidários. Ele pretendia tornar a Igreja
mais dinâmica, mais atraente para os tempos modernos, mais evangelizadora,
menos fechada, obsoleta e autorreferencial. Nada disto aconteceu. A Igreja
entrou em declínio em todo o mundo desenvolvido após o Vaticano II, sob papas
conservadores e liberais, mas o declínio foi mais rápido, onde a influência do Concílio
foi maior.
“A nova liturgia deveria envolver mais os fiéis na
Missa; em vez disso, os fiéis começaram a passar as manhãs de domingo na cama e
renunciaram às práticas quaresmais. A Igreja perdeu grande parte da Europa para
o secularismo e grande parte da América Latina para o pentecostalismo:
contextos e desafios muito diferentes, mas resultados surpreendentemente semelhantes”.
Em política, quando não se consegue o objetivo
pretendido, analisa-se, constata-se o fracasso e traça-se um novo caminho.
Veremos, portanto, as autoridades eclesiásticas proporem
um caminho verdadeiramente espiritual para a Igreja, voltada para a Evangelização,
para a salvação das almas, muito mais do que para a salvação dos corpos e da Natureza?
Quando deixaremos de ser prisoneiros de uma
experiência fracassada e permitiremos que o Espírito Santo renove a face da
Terra, concedendo um sopro de graças, qual nova Pentecostes, capaz de atrair os
homens e conduzi-los ao Reino de Cristo, que é também o Reino de Maria, profetizado
por Nossa Senhora de Fátima e, insistentemente, pedido por nós no Pai Nosso?
Segue abaixo o texto completo do artigo publicado no dia 12 de outubro de 2022.
How Catholics Became Prisoners of Vatican II
The New York Times, Oct.
12, 2022, By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
An Anglican priest
reflects on matters of faith in private life and public discourse. Get it with
a Times subscription
The Second Vatican
Council, the great revolution in the life of the modern Catholic Church, opened
60 years ago this week in Rome. So much of that 1960s-era world has passed
away, but the council is still with us; indeed for a divided church its
still-unfolding consequences cannot be escaped.
For a long time this would
have been a liberal claim. In the wars within Catholicism that followed the
council, the conservatives interpreted Vatican II as a discrete and limited
event — a particular set of documents that contained various shifts and
evolutions (on religious liberty and Catholic-Jewish relations especially) and
opened the door to a revised, vernacular version of the Mass. For the liberals,
though, these specifics were just the starting place: There was also a “spirit”
of the council, similar to the Holy Spirit in its operation, that was supposed
to guide the church into further transformations, perpetual reform.
The liberal interpretation
dominated Catholic life in the 1960s and 1970s, when Vatican II was invoked to
justify an ever-wider array of changes — to the church’s liturgy and calendar
and prayers, to lay customs and clerical dress, to church architecture and
sacred music, to Catholic moral discipline. Then the conservative
interpretation took hold in Rome with the election of John Paul II, who issued
a flotilla of documents intended to establish an authoritative reading of
Vatican II, to rein in the more radical experiments and alterations, to prove
that Catholicism before the 1960s and Catholicism afterward were still the same
tradition.
Now in the years of Pope
Francis, the liberal interpretation has returned — not just in the reopening of
moral and theological debates, the establishment of a permanent
listening-session style of church governance, but also in the attempt to once
again suppress the older Catholic rites, the traditional Latin liturgy as it
existed before Vatican II.
The Francis era has not
restored the youthful vigor that progressive Catholicism once enjoyed, but it
has vindicated part of the liberal vision. Through his governance and indeed
through his mere existence, this liberal pope has proved that the Second
Vatican Council cannot be simply reduced to a single settled interpretation, or
have its work somehow deemed finished, the period of experimentation ended and
synthesis restored.
Instead, the council poses
a continuing challenge, it creates intractable-seeming divisions, and it leaves
contemporary Catholicism facing a set of problems and dilemmas that Providence
has not yet seen fit to resolve.
Here are three statements
to encapsulate the problems and dilemmas. First, the council was necessary.
Maybe not in the exact form it took, an ecumenical council summoning all the
bishops from around the world, but in the sense that the church of 1962 needed
significant adaptations, significant rethinking and reform. These adaptations
needed to be backward-looking: The death of throne-and-altar politics, the rise
of modern liberalism and the horror of the Holocaust all required fuller
responses from the church. And they also needed to be forward-looking, in the
sense that Catholicism in the early 1960s had only just begun to reckon with
globalization and decolonization, with the information age and the social
revolutions touched off by the invention of the contraceptive pill.
Tradition has always
depended on reinvention, changing to remain the same, but Vatican II was called
at a moment when the need for such change was about to become particularly
acute.
This isn’t a truculent or
reactionary analysis. The Second Vatican Council failed on the terms its own
supporters set. It was supposed to make the church more dynamic, more
attractive to modern people, more evangelistic, less closed off and stale and
self-referential. It did none of these things. The church declined everywhere
in the developed world after Vatican II, under conservative and liberal popes alike
— but the decline was swiftest where the council’s influence was strongest.
The new liturgy was
supposed to make the faithful more engaged with the Mass; instead, the faithful
began sleeping in on Sunday and giving up Catholicism for Lent. The church lost
much of Europe to secularism and much of Latin America to Pentecostalism — very
different contexts and challengers, yet strikingly similar results.
And if anything,
post-1960s Catholicism became more inward-looking than before, more consumed
with its endless right-versus-left battles, and to the extent it engaged with
the secular world, it was in paltry imitation — via middling guitar music or
political theories that were just dressed-up versions of left-wing or
right-wing partisanship or ugly modern churches that were outdated 10 years
after they were built and empty soon thereafter.
There is no clever
rationalization, no intellectual schematic, no sententious Vatican propaganda —
a typical recent document refers to “the life-giving sustenance provided by the
council,” as though it were the eucharist itself — that can evade this cold
reality.
But neither can anyone
evade the third reality: The council cannot be undone.
By this I don’t mean that
the Mass can never return to Latin or that various manifestations of
post-conciliar Catholicism are inevitable and eternal or that cardinals in the
23rd century will still be issuing Soviet-style praise for the council and its
works.
I just mean that there is
no simple path back. Not back to the style of papal authority that both John
Paul II and Francis have tried to exercise — the former to restore tradition,
the latter to suppress it — only to find themselves frustrated by the
ungovernability of the modern church. Not to the kind of thick inherited
Catholic cultures that still existed down to the middle of the 20th century,
and whose subsequent unraveling, while inevitable to some extent, was clearly
accelerated by the church’s own internal iconoclasm. Not to the moral and
doctrinal synthesis, stamped with the promise of infallibility and consistency,
that the church’s conservatives have spent the last two generations insisting
still exists, but that in the Francis era has proved so unstable that those
same conservatives have ended up feuding with the pope himself.
The work of the French
historian Guillaume Cuchet, who has studied Vatican II’s impact on his once
deeply Catholic nation, suggests that it was the scale and speed of the
council’s reforms, as much as any particular substance, that shattered Catholic
loyalty and hastened the church’s decline. Even if the council’s changes did
not officially alter doctrine, to rewrite and renovate so many prayers and practices
inevitably made ordinary Catholics wonder why an authority that suddenly
declared itself to have been misguided across so many different fronts could
still be trusted to speak on behalf of Jesus Christ himself.
After such a shock, what
kind of synthesis or restoration is possible? Today all Catholics find
themselves living with this question, because every one of the church’s
factions is in tension with some version of church authority. Traditionalists
are in tension with the Vatican’s official policies, progressives with its
traditional teachings, conservatives with the liberalizing style of Pope
Francis, the pope himself with the conservative emphasis of his immediate
predecessors. In this sense, all of us are the children of Vatican II, even if
we critique or lament the council — or perhaps never more so than when we do.
Here, again, the liberals
have a point. The most traditionalist Catholics are stamped by what began in
1962 as surely as this anti-traditionalist pope, and the merely conservative — such
as, well, myself — are often in the position described by Peter Hitchens,
writing about the European high culture shattered by World War I: We may admire
the lost world’s intensity and rigors, but “none of us, now, could bear to
return to it even if we were offered the chance.”
But this point does not
vindicate the council, let alone the ever-evolving liberal interpretation of
its spirit. The church has to live with Vatican II, wrestle with it, somehow
resolve the contradictions it bequeathed us, not because it was a triumph but
precisely because it wasn’t: Failure casts a longer and more enduring shadow,
sometimes, than success.
You begin from where you
are. The lines of healing run along the lines of fracture, the wounds remain
after the resurrection, and even the Catholicism that arrives, not today but
someday, at a true After Vatican II will still be marked by the unnecessary
breakages created by its attempt at a necessary reform.
